Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/459

. None of that mattered. The noise, the clatter of tongues, the pressing and shoving of the crowd, the ear-piercing yells of the street-vendors—it was all essential silence to Neale because none of it*was directed at keeping him apart from Marise, as was the low-toned urbane conversation of the sight-seeing quartet.

He let himself go like a boy—as indeed he never had as a boy—on the few occasions when he waylaid her in the street, without Eugenia Mills, who seemed to have as great a passion for her society as he had. He was really a little out of his head with suspense, after an hour of anxious waiting about, smoking nervous cigarettes, his eyes on both ends of the street at once, his heart leaping up when he thought he saw her tall, nobly borne figure in the distance, dying down sickly when it turned out to be some other dark-haired girl. When finally she was really there he was too elated for pretense, swooping down on her, his hat in his hand, grinning—he knew it—like an idiot. He saw people in the street turn and look after him meaningly and smile to each other—and what did he care how big a fool he looked to them!

They fostered, for these queer, unprivate, intimate moments, a little tradition of their own, a tacit understanding that they would save up for them the things they specially wanted to talk about, the questions they wanted to ask each other that were no business of other people. They talked as fast as they could, sometimes Marise, sometimes Neale, as though they could never get caught up on what they had to tell each other. Neale was astounded to hear himself chattering, fairly chattering. They talked a good deal about Ashley, a great deal about their personal likes and dislikes, a good deal about what Neale was trying to get out of Europe. This seemed to interest Marise, curiously to interest her. She was always bringing him back to it. He was, she told him, new in her experience of Americans-in-Europe. She had seen so many, all her life, and thought she had them all sorted and labeled "… the kind, like my father, who find themselves just in their element at last in the religious seriousness of Europe