"Up there in the Batignolles. I seem to make out
it's worse than Merrimac Avenue."
"Worse--in what way?"
"Why, even less where the nice people live."
"He oughtn't to say that," I returned. And I ventured to back it up.
"Don't you call Mr. Porterfield a nice person?"
"Oh it doesn't make any difference." She watched me again a moment
through her veil, the texture of which gave her look a suffused
prettiness. "Do you know him very little?" she asked.
"Mr. Porterfield?"
"No, Mr. Nettlepoint."
"Ah very little. He's very considerably my junior, you see."
She had a fresh pause, as if almost again for my elegance; but she went
on: "He's younger than me too." I don't know what effect of the comic
there could have been in it, but the turn was unexpected and it made me
laugh. Neither do I know whether Miss Mavis took offence at my
sensibility on this head, though I remember thinking at the moment with
compunction that it had brought a flush to her cheek. At all events she
got up, gathering her shawl and her books into her arm. "I'm going
down--I'm tired."
"Tired of me, I'm afraid."
"No, not yet."
"I'm like you," I confessed. "I should like it to go on and on."
She had begun to walk along the deck to the companionway and I went with
her.
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