the first time!
“What am I to tell you?” he asked, in a voice creditably steady. He was beginning to feel grateful to her for that something final in her tone which had eased the strain.
“Why not tell me a tale?”
“A tale!” He was really amazed.
“Yes. Why not?”
These words came with a slight petulance, the hint of a loved woman's capricious will, which is capricious only because it feels itself to to be a law, embarrassing sometimes and always difficult to elude.
“Why not?” he repeated, with a slightly mocking accent, as though he had been asked to give her the moon. But now he was feeling a little angry with her for that feminine mobility that slips out of an emotion as easily as out of a splendid gown.
He heard her say, a little unsteadily with a sort of fluttering intonation which made him think suddenly of a butterfly's flight:
“You used to tell—your—your simple and—and professional—tales very well at one time. Or well enough to interest me. You had a—a sort of art—in the days—the days before the war.”
“Really?” he said, with involuntary gloom. “But now, you see, the war is going on,” he continued in such a dead, equable tone that she felt a slight chill fall over her shoulders. And yet she persisted. For there's nothing more unswerving in the world than a woman's caprice.
“It could be a tale not of this world,” she explained.
“You want a tale of the other, the better world?” he asked, with a matter-of-fact surprise. “You must evoke for that task those who have already gone there.”
“No. I don't mean that. I mean another—some other—world. In the universe—not in heaven.”
“I am relieved. But you forget that I have only five days' leave.”
“Yes. And I've also taken a five days' leave from—from my
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