Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/39

 She remained a long time. Or so it seemed. Jock sat meditating the things she had said. He disagreed with many of them—the atheistic ones in particular—and yet he rather liked them. They fitted Yvonne, somehow. She looked like a girl who would fear neither God nor man. "Probably she doesn't believe half of that, though," he told himself. "It's probably a pose. 'Try anything, however wicked'—easy to say, but she wouldn't, of course."

He wondered who the man was with whom she talked so intimately at the next table. He could hear the cadences of their voices behind him, but could distinguish no words. Until the very last; then he heard from Yvonne, "—you have me coming epigrams, Parke. Here's one: A jealous act is the X-ray picture of an inferiority complex"

When she returned to her own chair she was distrait. "Would you rather not talk?" asked Jock, after two or three unsuccessful attempts to reopen conversation.

"You talk. I'd like to listen."

To his surprise she did listen, attentively, with a quick shaking-off of her recent preoccupation. He could tell by her eyes that she was interested in what he said, and by the questions she asked that she wanted him to go on. Under this stimulus he found himself talking as he had never talked to any girl in his life; talking as he thought. And when they had finished their meal, on an impulse he would have believed impossible an hour before, he rewrote over the back of a menu-card the verse he had composed the previous night and slid it across to her.

She folded it and put it away in her mesh bag. "I'd rather read it when I'm alone," she said, and Jock liked that.

As they left the restaurant, he was conscious of a