Beginning with commonplaces, such as “You like Egypt?  You find here what you expected?” she led him into better regions with “One finds here what one brings.”  He knew the delightful experience of talking fluently on subjects he was at home in, and to some one who understood.  The feeling at first that to this woman he could not say mere anythings, slipped into its opposite—­that he could say everything.  Strangers ten minutes ago, they were at once in deep and intimate talk together.  He found his ideas readily followed, agreed with up to a point—­the point which permits discussion to start from a basis of general accord towards speculation.  In the excitement of ideas he neglected the uncomfortable note that had stirred his caution, forgot the warning too.  Her mind, moreover, seemed known to him; he was often aware of what she was going to say before he actually heard it; the current of her thoughts struck a familiar gait, and more than once he experienced vividly again the odd sensation that it all had happened before.  The very sentences and phrases with which she pointed the turns of her unusual ideas were never wholly unexpected.

For her ideas were decidedly unusual, in the sense that she accepted without question speculations not commonly deemed worth consideration at all, indeed not ordinarily even known.  Henriot knew them, because he had read in many fields.  It was the strength of her belief that fascinated him.  She offered no apologies.  She knew.  And while he talked, she listening with folded arms and her black eyes fixed upon his own, Richard Vance watched with vigilant eyes and listened too, ceaselessly alert.  Vance joined in little enough, however, gave no opinions, his attitude one of general acquiescence.  Twice, when pauses of slackening interest made it possible, Henriot fancied he surprised another quality in this negative attitude.  Interpreting it each time differently, he yet dismissed both interpretations with a smile.  His imagination leaped so absurdly to violent conclusions.  They were not tenable:  Vance was neither her keeper, nor was he in some fashion a detective.  Yet in his manner was sometimes this suggestion of the detective order.  He watched with such deep attention, and he concealed it so clumsily with an affectation of careless indifference.

There is nothing more dangerous than that impulsive intimacy strangers sometimes adopt when an atmosphere of mutual sympathy takes them by surprise, for it is akin to the false frankness friends affect when telling “candidly” one another’s faults.  The mood is invariably regretted later.  Henriot, however, yielded to it now with something like abandon.  The pleasure of talking with this woman was so unexpected, and so keen.