The Little Moment of HappinessKelland, Clarence Budington
General
The Little Moment of Happiness
Kelland, Clarence Budington
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Kendall studied her covertly. She impressed him as being a grave, very
self-possessed young person. The word demure conceals in its meaning
something of the provocative. If it were possible to remove that shade
of meaning from it, then it would have described Andree exactly. She was
demure without being provocative.... And how pretty she was. She grew on
one. Those heavily shadowed eyes were really beautiful, and her lips
delicately sweet. He made up his mind that she was what he had been
accustomed to designate as a lady, which was but another way of saying
“nice.”
Out of the corner of his eye he watched her eat. She was very dainty
about it, but also very interested. Indeed, she ate in a thoroughly
business-like manner, giving her attention fully to her plate. He
thought of a bird. Indeed, there was something birdlike about her, but
what bird she resembled Kendall could not determine. Possibly it was a
composite resemblance.... He liked her very much, but was puzzled by
her. She was something quite outside his experience. Her manner puzzled
him. She was not what he would have called “offish.” She did not seem
wholly at her ease, yet she was much more so than he. She was gravely
expectant; concealing herself, perhaps, while she waited for
self-disclosure on the part of Kendall.
She would drink but a fraction of a glass of wine and declined a
cigarette at the end of the meal.... Then he called for the check and
discovered that the rather light repast was to cost him seventy francs.
He wondered if Andree were accustomed to eating seventy-franc meals, not
knowing that this was the first experience of the kind she had ever had.
Seventy francs would have sufficed nearly for her food for a month....
On the whole, she was a mystery to him, and as long as he knew her she
continued to remain something of a mystery. He was incapable of solving
her.
“Now what shall we do?” he asked.
“We shall walk,” she replied, in quaintly stilted and accented English.
The effect was charming.
“Eh?” said Kendall. “You—why, you said you didn’t speak English!”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled, but offered no explanation. But the
explanation was clear, even to Kendall. It was because she was making no
admission whatever about herself in those first few minutes. It was
because she was on the brink of a new experience, was meeting her first
American, and because she wanted to find out as much as she could about
him without permitting him to learn anything whatever of her—until she
was ready to permit it.... He was pleased. Evidently her judgment was
favoring him.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Now you can teach me French and I can teach you
English.”
“Maybe,” she said, with her reserved smile. “We shall see.”
“Let’s take a taxi out to the Bois de Boulogne,” he suggested.
“It is very expensive.... It is not _nécessaire_. No, we shall walk.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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