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.