Between Friends | Page 3

"Certainly it's so. Please take this sandwich."
He stood looking at the outstretched arm, thinking of other things and
the girl sprang to her feet, caught his hand, opened the fingers, placed
the sandwich on the palm, then, with a short laugh as though slightly
disconcerted by her own audacity, she snatched the pipe from his left

hand and tossed it upon the table. When she had reseated herself on the
lounge beside her pasteboard box of luncheon, she became even more
uncertain concerning the result of what she had done, and began to
view with rising alarm the steady gray eyes that were so silently
inspecting her.
But after a moment Drene walked over to the sofa, seated himself,
curiously scrutinized the sandwich which lay across the palm of his
hand, then gravely tasted it.
"This will doubtless give me indigestion," he remarked. "Why, Cecile,
do you squander your wages on nourishment for me?"
"It cost only five cents."
"But why present five cents to me?" "I gave ten to a beggar this
morning."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Was he grateful?"
"He seemed to be."
"This sandwich is excellent; but if I feel the worse for it, I'll not be very
grateful to you." But he continued eating.
"'The woman tempted me,'" she quoted, glancing at him sideways.
After a moment's survey of her:
"You're one of those bright, saucy, pretty, inexplicable things that
throng this town and occasionally flit through this profession--aren't
you?"
"Am I?"

"Yes. Nobody looks for anything except mediocrity; you're one of the
surprises. Nobody expects you; nobody can account for you, but you
appear now and then, here and there, anywhere, even everywhere--a
pretty sparkle against the gray monotony of life, a momentary flash like
a golden moat afloat in sunshine--and what then?"
She laughed.
"What then? What becomes of you? Where do you go? What do you
turn into?"
"I don't know."
"You go somewhere, don't you? You change into something, don't you?
What happens to you, petite Cigale?"
"When?"
"When the sunshine is turned off and the snow comes."
"I don't know, Mr. Drene." She broke her chocolate cake into halves
and laid one on his knee.
"Thanks for further temptation," he said grimly.
"You are welcome. It's good, isn't it?"
"Excellent. Adam liked the apple, too. But it raised hell with him."
She laughed, shot a direct glance at him, and began to nibble her cake,
with her eyes still fixed on him.
Once or twice he encountered her gaze but his own always wandered
absently elsewhere.
"You think a great deal, don't you?" she remarked.
"Don't you?"

"I try not to--too much."
"What?" he asked, swallowing the last morsel of cake.
She shrugged her shoulders:
"What's the advantage of thinking?"
He considered her reply for a moment, her blue and rather childish eyes,
and the very pure oval of her face. Then his attention flagged as
usual--was wandering--when she sighed, very lightly, so that he
scarcely heard it--merely noticed it sufficiently to conclude that, as
usual, there was the inevitable hard luck story afloat in her vicinity, and
that he lacked the interest to listen to it.
"Thinking," she said, "is a luxury to a tranquil mind and a punishment
to a troubled one. So I try not to."
It was a moment or two before it occurred to him that the girl had
uttered an unconscious epigram.
"It sounded like somebody--probably Montaigne. Was it?" he inquired.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh. Then it wasn't. You're a funny little girl, aren't you?"
"Yes, rather."
"On purpose?"
"Yes, sometimes."
He looked into her very clear eyes, now brightly blue with intelligent
perception of his not too civil badinage.
"And sometimes," he went on, "you're funny when you don't intend to
be."

"You are, too, Mr. Drene."
"What?"
"Didn't you know it?"
A dull color tinted his cheek bones.
"No," he said, "I didn't know it."
"But you are. For instance, you don't walk; you stalk. You do what
novelists make their gloomy heroes do--you stride. It's rather funny."
"Really. And do you find my movements comic?"
She was a trifle scared, now, but she laughed her breathless, youthful
laugh:
"You are really very dramatic--a perfect story-book man. But, you
know, sometimes they are funny when the author doesn't intend them to
be. . . . Please don't be angry."
Why the impudence of a model should have irritated him he was at a
loss to understand--unless there lurked under that impudence a trace of
unflattering truth.
As he sat looking at her, all at once, and in an unexpected flash of
selfillumination, he realized that habit had made of him an actor; that
for a while--a long while--a space of time he could not at the moment
conveniently compute--he had been playing a