“What have you done, this last month?” she suddenly asked. “Have you been thinking of me?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“And what have you been thinking?”
“I’ve been wondering why you liked me.”
“Should I tell you?” She questioned him with her eyes also. “I like you because you are all in the future. When women get to be my age, they love to feel that they have a hold on the future. I am thirty-two,” she laughed.
“I don’t understand,” he stammered.
“You are a bit of my future,” she went on, “you shan’t ever lose the trace of me that I shall put in you. In that way, some of me has its youth still before it.”
Quincy had no impulse to break his silence. She continued. The lamp burned against her face, for him; against his face, for her. The room rolled away from it in a warm shadow.
“Can you deny that a trace of me will be indelible in you? I understand you so. Tell me, my boy—am I not the first woman who was ever kind to you?”
All of his manful air died out. There were tears in his eyes. He had thought of mentioning the girl he had kissed—and Adelaide, and mother. But he was afraid she might laugh.