Nicky fidgeted and sulked:
“I do not neet to told you now. You have such a hatink from me, it is no use.”
“If you had told me you simply wanted to spoon with me I could have stayed at home. You said you wanted to ask me something.”
“I have my enswer. It is not any neet to esk.”
Mamise was puzzled; her wrath was yielding to curiosity. But she could not imagine how to coax him out of silence.
His disappointment coaxed him. He groaned:
“Ach Gott, I am so lunly. My own people doand trust me. These Yenkees also not. I get no chence to proof how I loaf my Vaterland. But the time comes soon, and I must make patience. Eile mit Weile!”
“You’d better tell me what’s on your mind,” Mamise suggested, but he shook his head. The car rolled into the gloom of the park, a gloom rather punctuated than diminished by the street-lamps. Mamise realized that she could not extort Nicky’s secret from him by asserting her own dignity.
She wondered how to persuade him, and found no ideas except such silly schemes as were suggested by her memory of the vampire picture. She hated the very passage of such thoughts through her mind, but they kept returning, with an insistent idea that a patriotic vampire might accomplish something for her country as Delilah and Judith had “vamped” for theirs. She had never seen a vampire exercise her fascinations in a fur coat in a dark automobile, but perhaps the dark was all the better for her purpose.
At any rate, she took the dare her wits presented her, and after a struggle with her own mutinous muscles she put out her hand and sought Nicky’s, as she cooed: