“Really?”
The woman sat down on the edge of the cot. Her interest did not seem an affectation. Her figure was thin but lithe. One wouldn’t know in these shadows if she were nearer twenty-five or thirty-five. She seemed altogether without haste, smiling easily, but slow to laugh aloud. Her eyes looked startlingly knowing as she lit a cigarette—not natural somehow. At the same time in the matchlight her face had looked tired and weathered. Her way of speaking was like an English person, or one educated in England.
“Do you mean stories?” she asked.
“Yes, a book, a long story—set in eighteenth-century France.”
“But you seem so young.”
“I have written for a long time—always written.”
“How old are you, please?”
“Nineteen—but I have lived in a writing house always.”
“Where is your house? I have been to Los Angeles.”
“Back in a canyon near Santa Monica and my father is there now—in his slippers. He teaches every one how to write——” There was something baleful in the girl’s blue eyes, or perhaps it was exhaustion, as she smiled.