And while he leaned over the innocent sleeper and scanned her face, and looked at her with eyes of unkindness, she felt his eyes upon her. Uneasy under his scrutiny she made a great effort to raise her heavy lids and to smile: and she said, stammering a little like a waking child:
“Don’t look at me. I’m ugly. …”
She fell back at once, weighed down with sleep, smiled once more, murmured.
“Oh! I’m so … so sleepy! …” and went off again into her dreams.
He could not help laughing: he kissed her childish lips more tenderly. He watched the girl sleeping for a moment longer, and got up quietly. She gave a comfortable sigh when he was gone. He tried not to wake her as he dressed, though there was no danger of that: and when he had done he sat in the chair near the window and watched the steaming smoking river which looked as though it were covered with ice: and he fell into a brown study in which there hovered music, pastoral, melancholy.
From time to time she half opened her eyes and looked at him vaguely, took a second or two, smiled at him, and passed from one sleep to another. She asked him the time.
“A quarter to nine.”
Half asleep she pondered:
“What! Can it be a quarter to nine?”
At half-past nine she stretched, sighed, and said that she was going to get up.
It was ten o’clock before she stirred. She was petulant.
“Striking again! … The clock is fast! …” He laughed and went and sat on the bed by her side. She put her arms round his neck and told him her dreams. He did not listen very attentively and interrupted her with little love words. But she made him be silent and went on very seriously, as though she were telling something of the highest importance:
“She was at dinner: the Grand Duke was there: Myrrha was a Newfoundland dog. … No, a frizzy sheep who waited at table. … Ada had discovered a method of rising from the earth, of walking, dancing, and lying down in the air. You see it was quite simple: you had only to do … thus … thus … and it was done. …”
Christophe laughed at her. She laughed too, though a little ruffled at his laughing. She shrugged her shoulders.
“Ah! you don’t understand! …”
They breakfasted on the bed from the same cup, with the same spoon.
At last she got up: she threw off the bedclothes and slipped down from the bed. Then she sat down to recover her breath and looked at her feet. Finally she clapped her hands and told him to go out: and as he was in no hurry about it she took him by the shoulders and thrust him out of the door and then locked it.
After she had dawdled, looked over and stretched each of her handsome limbs, she sang, as she washed, a sentimental lied in fourteen couplets, threw water at Christophe’s face—he was outside drumming on the window—and as they left she plucked the last rose in the garden and then they took the steamer. The mist was not yet gone: but the sun shone through it: they floated through a creamy light. Ada sat at the stern with Christophe: she was sleepy and a little sulky: she grumbled about the light in her eyes, and said that she would have a headache all day. And as Christophe did not take her complaints seriously enough she returned into morose silence. Her eyes were hardly opened and in them was the funny gravity of children who have just woke up. But at the next landing-stage an elegant lady came and sat not far from her, and she grew lively at once: she talked eagerly to Christophe about things sentimental and distinguished. She had resumed with him the ceremonious Sie.
Christophe was thinking about what she could say to her employer by way of excuse for her lateness. She was hardly at all concerned about it.
“Bah! It’s not the first time.”
“The first time that … what?”
“That I have been late,” she said, put out by the question.
He dared not ask her what had caused her lateness.
“What will you tell her?”
“That my mother is ill, dead … how do I know?”
He was hurt by her talking so lightly.
“I don’t want you to lie.”
She took offense:
“First of all, I never lie. … And then, I cannot very well tell her. …”
He asked her half in jest, half in earnest:
“Why not?”
She laughed, shrugged, and said that he was coarse and ill-bred, and that she had already asked him not to use the Du to her.
“Haven’t I the right?”
“Certainly not.”
“After what has happened?”
“Nothing has happened.”
She looked at him a little defiantly and laughed: and although she was joking, he felt most strongly that it would not have cost her much to say it seriously and almost to believe it. But some pleasant memory tickled her: for she burst out laughing and looked at Christophe and kissed him loudly without any concern for the people about, who did not seem to be in the least surprised by it.
Now on all his excursions he was accompanied by shopgirls and clerks: he did not like their vulgarity, and used to try to lose them: but Ada out of contrariness was no longer disposed for wandering in the woods. When it rained or for some other reason they did not leave the town he would take her to the theater, or
