Page:The Sacred Fount (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901).djvu/126

 "Do you call it getting on with her to be the more bewildered the more I see her?"

"Isn't to say you're bewildered only, on the whole, to say you're charmed? That always—doesn't it?—describes more or less any engrossed relation with a lovely lady."

"Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid without brightness. "I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after women."

"Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world should you? It's the last thing!" I laughed. "But isn't this—quite (what shall one call it?) innocently—rather a peculiar case?"

My question produced in him a little gesture of elation—a gesture emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb. "I knew you knew it was special! I knew you've been thinking about it!"

"You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five minutes, made me do so with some sharpness. I don't pretend that I don't now recognise that there must be something the matter. I only desire—not unnaturally—that there should be, to put me in the right for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be brought home to me. If Mrs. Server is beautiful 120