He had used the second person singular. She answered: “I? Perhaps I have, let me see.” Her voice and smile did betray an excitement, a consciousness⁠—such as comes when the first word is uttered in a relationship long secretly sustained⁠—a subtle consciousness, which concentrates all the past in a single moment of the present. “You are so eager⁠—you are very ambitious”⁠—she continued thus to mock him, in her slightly veiled, pleasantly husky voice, with her quaint pronunciation, giving a foreign sound to the r and making the vowels too open, even accenting the word “ambitious” on the first syllable, with exotic effect; rummaging and peering the while in her leather bag, whence she fetched out, first a handkerchief, and then a little silver pencil, slender and fragile, a pretty trinket scarcely meant for use⁠—the other, the first one, had been something more to take hold of.

“ Voilà ,” she said, and held the toy by its end before his eyes, between thumb and forefinger, and lightly turned it to and fro.