“What’ll you have?” Eugene said. “Whisky?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said with the same sweet crisp assurance with which she always spoke, “and a splash of soda.” He struck a match and held it for her while she lit the cigarette she was holding in her hand, and in a moment returned to her with the drink. Then she sat down, crossed her legs, and for a moment puffed thoughtfully at her cigarette as she stared into the fire. The storm wind moaned in the great trees along the road and near the house, and suddenly a swirl of rain and wind struck the windows with a rattling blast. The girl stirred a little in her chair, restlessly, shivered.
“Listen!” she said. “What a night! Horrible weather we have here, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t like the fog and rain so well. But this—the way it is tonight—” he nodded toward the window—“I like it.”
She looked at him for a moment.
“Oh,” she said non-committally. “You do.” Then, as she sipped her drink, she looked curiously about the room, her reflective glance finally resting on his table, where there was a great stack of the ledgers in which he wrote.
“I say,” she cried again, “what are you doing with all those big books there?”
“I write in them.”
“Really?” she said, in a surprised tone. “I should think it’d be an awful bother carrying them around when you travel?”
“It is. But it’s the best way I’ve found of keeping what I do together.”
“Oh,” she said, as before, and continued to stare curiously at him with her fair, lovely young face, the curiously hard, bright, and unrevealing glance of her eye. “I see…. But why do you come to such a place as this to write?” she said presently. “Do you like it here?”
“I do. As well as any place I’ve ever known.”
“Oh!… I should think a writer would want a different kind of place.”
“What kind?”
“Oh—I don’t know—Paris—London—some place like that, where there are lots of life—people—fun—I should think you’d work better in a place like that.”
“I work better here.”
