“That’s good. Much better.”
She sat silent while, with enormous and self-betraying pains to avoid detection, he studied her firm thin brilliantly red lips. At last he tried:
“Please tell me something about London. Some of you English— Oh, I dunno. I can’t get acquainted easily.”
“My dear child, I’m not English! I’m quite as American as yourself. I was born in California. I never saw England till two years ago, on my way to Paris. I’m an art student…. That’s why my accent is so perishin’ English—I can’t afford to be just ordinary British, y’ know.”
Her laugh had an October tang of bitterness in it.
“Well, I’ll—say, what do you know about that!” he said, weakly.
“Tell me about yourself—since apparently we’re now acquainted…. Unless you want to go to that music-hall?”
“Oh no, no, no! Gee, I was just crazy to have somebody to talk to—somebody nice—I was just about nutty, I was so lonely,” all in a burst. He finished, hesitatingly, “I guess the English are kinda hard to get acquainted with.”
“Lonely, eh?” she mused, abrupt and bluffly kind as a man, for all her modulating woman’s voice. “You don’t know any of the people here in the house?”
“No’m. Say, I guess we got rooms next to each other.”