She didn’t speak again till she had satisfied herself, by means of the pocket-mirror, that no irreparable ruin had befallen her pretty face since the last inspection. Her action seemed prompted by childish curiosity rather than by vanity. It was as though when she saw her own beauty, she saw it with amazement as belonging to another person. It made him think of the first sight he had had of her: a small girl kneeling beside the edge of a fountain and stooping to kiss her own reflection. He remembered her clasped hands and dismay when her lips had disturbed the water’s surface, and her image had vanished. The examination ended, she gazed at him thoughtfully. “I’ve still to tell you about that--the thing for which I’ve to ask your forgiveness. Shall I tell you now?--No. It’s about Fluffy, and----” Her finger went up to her mouth. “We don’t agree on Fluffy. And we’ve neither of us recovered from our last---- Was it a quarrel?” She coaxed him with her smile, as though he were insisting that it was. “Not quite a quarrel. Not as bad as that I expect you and I’ll always have to be forgiving. I have a feeling--But you’ll always forgive me, won’t you?” Before he could answer, she leant companionably across the table, “Do you believe in romance? I don’t.” His sense of humor was touched. One minute she rapped him over the knuckles as though he were a tiny, misbehaving boy, the next it was she who was young and he who was elderly. “You’re irresistible.” “Ah!” She gave a pleased little sigh. “When I choose to be fascinating--yes. D’you think the waiter would call me madam, if he could see me now? But tell me, do you believe in romance?” “Believe in romance!” He felt her slippered foot touching his beneath the table. “I couldn’t look at you and not believe in it. Everything that’s ever happened to you and me is romance: the way Hal and Farmer Joseph brought me to you; the way we met in the dead of night at Glastonbury; and now---- I’ve come like a troubadour as far as Columbus, just to be near you. Isn’t that romance? Romance is like happiness; it’s in the heart It doesn’t shine into you; it shines out Even those people over there, hopping about to rag-time, they don’t seem vulgar; they become romance when you and I watch them.” “But they’re not vulgar.” She spoke on the defensive. “If you could turkey-trot, I’d be one of them. Oh, dear, what an awful lot of things you disapprove of. I’ll have to make a list of them. There! You see----” She spread out her appealing hands. “I’m being horrid again. I can’t help it.” The babies crept into her eyes. “I’m not the girl you think me. I’m really not.” The slippered foot beneath the table had withdrawn itself. “You’re better,” he whispered. “You’re unexpected. None of my magic cloaks fit you. You’re surprising. A man likes to be surprised.”