"Will you take something?" she asked, the hostess.
Whisky and a siphon and glasses were on the sideboard.
"Oh no, thanks!"
"Not even a cigarette?" Holding out the box and looking up at him,
she appealed with a long, anxious glance that he should honour her
cigarettes.
"Thank you!" he said. "I should like a cigarette very much."
She lit a match for him.
"But you--do you not smoke?"
"Yes. Sometimes."
"Try one of mine--for a change."
He produced a long, thin gold cigarette-case, stuffed with cigarettes.
She lit a cigarette from his.
"Oh!" she cried after a few violent puffs. "I like enormously your
cigarettes. Where are they to be found?"
"Look!" said he. "I will put these few in your box." And he poured
twenty cigarettes into an empty compartment of the box, which was
divided into two.
"Not all!" she protested.
"Yes."
"But I say NO!" she insisted with a gesture suddenly firm, and put a
single cigarette back into his case and shut the case with a snap, and
herself returned it to his pocket. "One ought never to be without a
cigarette."
He said:
"You understand life.... How nice it is here!" He looked about and
then sighed.
"But why do you sigh?"
"Sigh of content! I was just thinking this place would be something
else if an English girl had it.
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