“Well, what did it mean?” he insisted.
“What I said — just what I said. Why aren’t you fair?”
“Ah, this is at least a reproach!”
She coloured to the roots of her hair.
“It looks as if you were trying to make out that I am disagreeable rent photo equipment,” she murmured. “Am I? You will make me afraid to open my mouth presently. I shall end by believing I am no good.”
Her head drooped a little. He looked at her smooth, low brow, the faintly coloured checks, and the red lips parted slightly, with the gleam of her teeth within.
“And then I won’t be any good,” she added with conviction. “That I won’t! I can only be what you think I am.”
He made a slight movement. She put her hand on his arm, without raising her head, and went on, her voice animated in the stillness of her body:
“It is so. It couldn’t be any other way with a girl like me and a man like you. Here we are, we two alone, and I can’t even tell where we are.”
“A very well-known spot of the globe,” Heyst uttered gently. “There must have been at least fifty thousand circulars issued at the time — a hundred and fifty thousand, more likely. My friend was looking after that, and his ideas were large and his belief very strong news hongkong. Of us two it was he who had the faith. A hundred and fifty thousand, certainly.”
“What is it you mean?” she asked in a low tone.
“What should I find fault with you for?” Heyst went on. “, good, gracious — and pretty?”
A silence fell. Then she said:
“It’s all right that you should think that of me. There’s no one here to think anything of us, good or bad.”
The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered. The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she seemed to abandon to him something of herself — something excessively subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he would have missed horribly if she were to go away travel industry. While he was looking into her eyes she raised her bare forearm, out of the short sleeve, and held it in the air till he noticed it and hastened to pose his great bronze moustaches on the whiteness of the skin. Then they went in.