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