She gave a quick smile of intelligence, of sympathy, and, with a knowing toss of the head and a provoking glance, suggested, "Je te mets la tête en feu, quoi!"
She, you perceive, was entirely at her ease, mistress of the situation. It is conceivable that she had met neophytes before—that I was by no means to her the unprecedented experience she was to me. At any rate, she understood my agitation and sought to reassure me.
"Don't be afraid; I'll not eat you," she promised.
I, in the depths of my mind, had been meditating what I could not but deem an excessively audacious proposal. Her last speech gave me my cue, and I risked it.
"Perhaps you would like to eat something else? If—if we should go somewhere and sup?"
"Monsieur thinks he will be safer to take precautions," she laughed. "Well—I submit."
So we removed ourselves to the vestiaire, where she put on her cloak, and exchanged her slippers for a pair of boots (you can guess, perhaps, who enjoyed the beatific privilege of buttoning them for her); and then we left the Closerie des Lilas, falsely so called, with its flaring gas, its stifling atmosphere, its boisterous merrymakers, and walked arm in arm—only this time it was my arm that was within hers—down the Boul' Miche, past the Luxembourg gardens, where sweet airs blew in our faces, to the Gambrinus restaurant, in the Rue de Médicis. And there you should have seen P'tit-Bleu devouring écrevisses. Whatsoever this young woman's hand found to do, she did it with her might. She attacked her écrevisses with the same jubilant abandon with which she had executed her bewildering single-step. She devoured them with an energy, an enthusiasm, a thoroughness, that it was invigorating to witness; smacking her lips, and smiling, and, from time to time,between
