“I don’t suppose we can find a Black Cat here, but perhaps Claridge’s might do for a substitute,” he suggested.
She expressed her delight and excused herself to go into the next room and change to more suitable attire. When she reappeared she seemed more radiantly beautiful than ever. She had slipped on a filmy dress of blue crêpe bordered with silver.
“You look charming!” he said.
“Oh, that’s the conventional thing to say,” she retorted. “That’s what every one says.”
“No wonder every one says it!”
“And that’s conventional, too,” said Dorothy with an arch frown. She was patting her hair into position and taking one last look at herself in the mirror above the mantel. “But today let’s not be conventional. You are going to Corinth. I don’t know when we’ll meet again. So let’s not spend our time in looking at each other through masks.” They were walking down the stairs now. “No, don’t interrupt; and you were going to say, ‘But I meant it.’ It’s like a game. Your partner leads with this remark and you come back with that. Ordinarily, I can tell exactly what a man is going to reply to whatever I say.”
In the taxi, she resumed the thread of her thought.
“Why can’t men and women talk to each other just as two men do?”
“Well, don’t they?”
“No, they simply bandy expressions back and forth like a tennis ball. The man always flatters the woman. She always deprecates his words, and he affirms them.”