For they were busy
drinking beer from a bottle, turn about, and kissing each other
delightedly between swallows. Joyselle started, drawing a deep breath,
and Brigit, without moving her head, looked at him sideways, as the
so-called Fornarina looks in the Uffizi, in Florence.
"They are cheery, aren't they?" she asked hastily, and he, nodding,
turned away. For a few moments he was silent, and then he began to talk
rather loudly about nothing in particular, and in a few moments was
himself--the Joyselle of that particular day. Brigit realised that their
stronghold of reserves and lies had been dangerously threatened by his
mounting emotion. If he had broken down in his _role_--and she knew
that the playing of any kind of a _role_ was foreign to his nature, and
therefore perilous--she would have lost him.
His mind, of course, except in certain moments when it all unconsciously
was subjugated by her will, was a closed book to her.
For he was not only a man (and no woman can ever wholly understand any
man's mind), but he was nearly twenty years older than she, and he was a
Norman--a race very complicated, in its mixture of shrewd cunning and
simplicity, and difficult for even other French people to comprehend.
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