“Of course—I remember you perfectly now, Miss—ah.”
He tried, as he took her extended hand, to mumble something unintelligible enough to pass for her name, looking at her with an admiration purposely open in the hope of distracting her attention, but the ruse was of no avail. She only smiled into his face with impish delight.
“You people from the East are so dreadfully disingenuous,” she complained. “Why not confess frankly that, so far as you are concerned, I belong to the ‘no name’ series?”
Her eyes were dancing, and suddenly Van Mater felt as if he had known her always—eons before he had known himself in his present incarnation.
“To think that I shouldn’t have recognized you in the pink gown,” he murmured, with well-feigned surprise. “And to think that I’m no more surprised than I am to have you suddenly bob up here in the wet, after your wanderings of perhaps a hundred lifetimes! I can’t seem to recall the date and planet upon which we last met,” he continued, apologetically, “but I fancy that we picked mushrooms in those old times—that the earth and air were all sopping, just as they are now.”
“You write books—you know you do!”
“Well—it’s a decent enough occupation!”
“Yes,” uncertainly. “Still, writers aren’t usually very sincere; they don’t mean what they say. They spin copy as a spider does a web!”
“Writers not sincere—don’t mean what they say!” he echoed. “Why, my dear young lady, you’re all wrong. They usually mean so much that they can’t begin to say it—and as for sincerity, they’re the sincerest people in the world!”
“That is, while it lasts!” he added to himself, but his listener, who had stooped to the ground and was now holding up a particularly large and luscious mushroom, was all unconscious of his reservation.