But she, believing in his love and in herself, saw nothing, suspected
nothing. "We know each other so thoroughly," she went on, "that we don't
need to make any effort. How congenial we are! I always understand you.
I feel such a sense of the perfect freedom and perfect frankness between
us. Don't you?"

"You have wonderful intuitions," said he.

It was the time to alarm him by coldness, by capriciousness. But how
could she know it? And she was in love--really in love--not with
herself, not with love, but with him. Thus, she made the mistake of all
true lovers in those difficult moments. She let him see how absolutely
she was his. Nor did the spectacle of her sincerity, of her belief in
his sincerity put him in any better humor with himself.

The walk was a mere matter of a dozen blocks. He thought it would never
end. "You are sure you aren't ill?" she said, when they were at her
door--a superb bronze door it was, opening into a house of the splendor
that for the acclimated New Yorker quite conceals and more than
compensates absence of individual taste. "You don't look ill. But you
act queerly."

"I'm often this way when they drive me too hard down town."

She looked at him with fond admiration; he might have been better
pleased had there not been in the look a suggestion of the possessive.
"How they do need you! Father says--But I mustn't make you any vainer
than you are."