"Why, to be sure. You know, we always go to the theatre together. Only for her I should be quite alone."
"And do you like this kind of thing?" he asks clumsily.
She bursts into a merry laugh. "Like it? Why, I get my living by it. We all have to live, you know, and I've no one to look out for me but myself, and——"
She pauses suddenly, having caught his eye fixed upon her with a gaze of passionate admiration. This first calls up the look of gravity we have spoken of, and then brings the color sharply to her face. It also reminds her of the somewhat peculiar character of the interview. The instant after she resumes, as if continuing her sentence, "Did you come here to ask me that?"
"No," he replies bluntly. "I never thought of the question until the moment before I asked it."
"Please tell me, then," she proceeds, with gathering surprise, "what did you come for?"
He hesitates a moment, moved by the superstition or the honest feeling that he must tell her no word of untruth, and then quietly answers:
"I am not sure that I know."
"Not sure that you know?"
"No."