They got rid of Lobbie at the corner of Chequers Street, and moved on, side by side, past the lighted shopwindows. It was a further revelation to him of the ways of girls, to notice that Gerda repeatedly stopped him, with a childish clutch at his coat-sleeve, before some trifle in those lighted windows that attracted her attention. Her eyes were dreamy with a soft languorous happiness; while her little cries of pleasure at what she saw made ripples in the surface of her mental trance like the rising of a darting shoal of minnows to the top of deep water.
As for his own mood, the lights of the town, its traffic and its crowds, threw him upon a rich, dark, incredible intimacy with her, whose sweetness reduced everything to a vague reassuring stage-play. Everything became a play whose living puppets seemed so touchingly lovable that he could have wept to behold them, and to know that she was beholding them with him!
When they reached the door of the Malakite bookshop, however, he became conscious of so deep an unwillingness to face the look of Christie’s steady brown eyes that he impetuously begged off.