For a moment Bernie forgot her pose and looked frankly incredulous. Then she tapped her cigarette and sniffed.
“I don’t know that I blame her, Nat. You always were rather impossible from a woman’s standpoint, you know.”
Nathan let it pass.
“I’ve brought you something, Bernie, that you might like to keep,” he said. And upon the table at her elbow he laid the little packet of childhood love letters.
“For God’s sake, what’re those?”
“The letters we wrote, Bernie, while we were boy-and-girl sweethearts in the graded school together.”
Bernie dropped her cigarette. She had a bad time recovering it and the fire burned a small hole in the smock before she had done so. She swore.
“But what the devil do you suppose I want of them now?”
“I don’t know, Bernie. I thought perhaps they might mean something to you—little relics from the past, as I’ve always regarded them.”
“You always were a sickly, sentimental fool, Nat. As for the past, the less we discuss it or think about it, the better I’ll be pleased. I’ve had trouble enough weaning myself ‘from the past.’ The present and future gives me bother enough, God knows. As for Paris, I hate it as I hate copperheads in a mangrove swamp. I’m done with it forever and never want to be dragged back into it again—not even to be buried.”