"Oh, don't!" she cried. "You make me feel quite hysterical! You have no right to upset all my views on my own character, as well as on yours. I _know_ I am stupidly demonstrative. I have often blushed all over because I have told you things I never meant to tell any one. How can you say I am reserved? I only wish I were!" "The few confidences of a reserved person are always rash ones," observed Paul. "The same might be said of the reflections of an impulsive person, or the impulses of a reflective one. It all comes from want of habit. You can't alter your temperament, that's all." "But I can't believe that I am reserved," she persisted; "it seems incredible. And it makes us more alike than ever." "Really, Katharine, I beg you to rid your mind of that exceedingly fallacious notion," said Paul, laughing. "I assure you I am to be read like a book." "A book in a strange language, then. I don't think I shall ever be able to read it," said Katharine, shaking her head. And she drew down a rebuke upon herself for being solemn. They had a tacit unwillingness to become serious, about this time; their conversation was made up of trivialities, and he never kissed her except on the tips of her fingers. They avoided any demonstration of feeling that might have revealed to them the anomaly of their position, and they mutually shrank from defining their relations towards one another. They were standing together at the window, one day, looking down into Fountain Court, which was as hot and as dusty as ever in spite of the water that was playing into the basin in the middle. "What are you thinking about?" he asked her, so suddenly that she was surprised into an answer. "I was thinking how queer it is that you and I should be friends like this," she replied, truthfully. "What's the matter with our friendship, then?" he asked, in the prosaic manner he always assumed when she showed any sentiment. She laughed. "There's nothing the matter with it, of course. You are the most unromantic person I ever knew. You seem to delight in divesting every little trivial incident of its sentiment. What makes you such a Vandal?" "But, surely, you are not supposing that there _is_ any romance in our knowing each other, are you?" "I never dreamed of such a thing," retorted Katharine. "I think there is more romance in your cigarette holder than in the whole of you!" Sometimes she wondered if he were capable of deep feeling at all, or if his indifference were really assumed. "I envy you your utter disregard of circumstance," she once exclaimed to him. "How did you learn it? Do you really never feel things, or is it only an easy way of getting through life?" "I'm afraid I don't see what you are driving at. I dare say you are being very brilliant, but I fail to discern what I am expected to say."