“Oh, I can't decide for you. I merely formulate your decisions after you reach them,—if they're favorable.”
“Well, then, what is this one?”
“Is it favorable?”
“You said you would formulate it.” She laughed again, and Staniford started as one does when a nebulous association crystallizes into a distinctly remembered fact.
“What a curious laugh you have!” he said. “It's like a nun's laugh. Once in France I lodged near the garden of a convent where the nuns kept a girls' school, and I used to hear them laugh. You never happened to be a nun, Miss Blood?”
“No, indeed!” cried Lydia, as if scandalized.
“Oh, I merely meant in some previous existence. Of course, I didn't suppose there was a convent in South Bradfield.” He felt that the girl did not quite like the little slight his irony cast upon South Bradfield, or rather upon her for never having been anywhere else. He hastened to say, “I'm sure that in the life before this you were of the South somewhere.”
“Yes?” said Lydia, interested and pleased again as one must be in romantic talk about one's self. “Why do you think so?”
He bent a little over toward her, so as to look into the face she instinctively averted, while she could not help glancing at him from the corner of her eye. “You have the color and the light of the South,” he said. “When you get to Italy, you will live in a perpetual mystification. You will go about in a dream of some self of yours that was native there in other days. You will find yourself retrospectively related to the olive faces and the dark eyes you meet; you will recognize sisters and cousins in the patrician ladies when you see their portraits in the palaces where you used to live in such state.”
Staniford spiced his flatteries with open burlesque; the girl entered into his fantastic humor. “But if I was a nun?” she asked, gayly.