“Because I kissed you?”
“You hint at the true reason so chivalrously, so delicately,” she said, “that I scarcely recognise it.” The cool mockery of her voice and the warm, quick colour tinting neck and face were incongruous. He thought with slow surprise that she was not yet letter-perfect in her rôle of the material triumphant over the spiritual. A trifle ashamed, too, he sat silent, watching the silken petals fall one by one as she slowly detached them with delicate, restless lips.
“I am sorry I came,” she said reflectively. “You don't know why I came, do you? Sheer loneliness, Mr. Siward; there is something of the child in me still, you see. I am not yet sufficiently resourceful to take it out in a quietly tearful obligato; I never learned how to produce tears.... So I came to you.” She had stripped the petals from the rose, and now, tossing the crushed branch from her, she leaned forward and broke from its stem a heavy, perfumed bud, half unfolded.
“It seems my fate to pass my life in bidding you good night,” she said, straightening up and turning to him with the careless laughter touching mouth and eyes again. Then, resting her weight on one hand, her smooth, white shoulder rounded beside her cheek, she looked at him out of humourous eyes:
“What is it that women find so attractive in you? The man's experienced insouciance? The boy's unconscious cynicism? The mystery of your self-sufficiency? The faulty humanity in you? The youth in you already showing traces of wear that hint of future scars? What will you be at thirty-five? At forty?... Ah,” she added softly, “what are you now? For I don't know, and you cannot tell me if you would.... Out of these little windows called eyes we look at one another, and study surfaces, and try to peep into neighbours' windows. But all is dark behind the windows—always dark, in there where they tell us souls hide.”
She laid the shell-pink bud against her cheek that matched it, smiling with wise sweetness to herself.
“What counts with you?” he asked after a moment.
“Counts? How?”
“In your affections. What prepossesses you?”
She laughed audaciously: “Your traits—some of them—all of them that you reveal. You must be aware of that much already, considering everything—”