Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/166

 "So was I."

"I was thinking," she continued, "that you are either the most indifferent or the most incurious man I have ever met."

"Am I? Perhaps I am," he added, "indifferent to all except the present, incurious as to everything beyond the range of my vision."

"The proper thing," she said after a further period of silence, "was to ask why. When a woman accuses a man of not being curious, it always means that she wants to tell him something."

"Does it?"

She nodded. Her nod seemed to establish an intimacy between them.

"Then will you please tell me something?"

"You make things so—so difficult," she said crinkling her brows and looking straight before her. "You don't avail yourself of conversational openings." She turned and smiled up at him.

"Please why am I the most commonplace and ordinary of men?" he enquired.

"I didn't say that," she laughed. "I said you were either the most indifferent or most incurious of men."

"Please tell me why?"

"Well," she replied, "you have never expressed the least curiosity as to who I am."

"But you're the Rain-Girl." He held his breath, wondering how she would receive the reference to the name he had given her.

A little gurgling laugh reassured him.