Meanwhile he answered, distracted and unready:
"You knew me then? I thought I was pretty well disguised."
"Oh, you've forgotten how hard it is to deceive me. I should never try it, if I were you. Of course I knew you! I should know you if you had covered your head in a sack."
He stammered, and he was not often confused enough to stammer. "I don't know how to tell you how beautiful you are, Miss Payson."
She spoke low and slowly, with a wayward inflection, "Oh, I'm so sorry." Then she added, "I scarcely dared speak to you, you are so magnificent."
"I would need to be, to be worthy of sitting beside you," he replied, his wits floating, unmanageable.
"Of course, I was only flattered by your frankness."
"It's so easy to be frank with you," she said. "You see, I'm perfectly myself with you, even _en masque_. I doubt if any of my friends would know me as I am with you."
"But I've seen a new 'you' that I haven't known before."
"Then she owes her existence to your presence. But how am I different? Tell me."
"You take my breath away. You say such charming things to me that it deprives me of the power of answering you--anything I could say seems ineffective and cheap. You get ahead of me so. Really, you'll have to be positively rude to me before I can summon presence of mind enough to say anything gallant."
Again her lips curved daintily. Her voice was dulcet:
"Then I am afraid I shall never hear any nice things from you."
He was reduced; baffled by her suavity. He sought in vain for a fitting return. He had the impulse to take advantage of her courtesy, however, and gratify some portion of his desire to be nearer her. She wore, suspended from the gold top-button of her "qua," a red silk tassel with a filigree network of silver threads, containing a gold heart-shaped scent bottle. He reached to it and tried to remove it from its place, covering this slight advance jocosely, with the remark:
"Is that your heart you have there? It seems to be pure gold."
She did not resent what might possibly have been considered a familiarity, but smiled when she saw that he could not remove the bottle from the meshes.
"I'm afraid you won't be able to get at it, that way." There was a touch of playful emphasis in her voice.