داستان کوتاه A Ramble in Aphasia صفحه 7

'Are you sure you know me?' I asked. 'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.' 'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from Cornopolis, Kansas.' 'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance. 'Why, that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to see Marian.' Her voice lowered slightly - 'You haven't changed much, Elwyn.' I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more closely. 'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant note in her latest tones; 'I see it now. You haven't forgotten. You haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you you never could.' I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe. 'I'm sure I beg your pardon,' I said, a little uneasy at her gaze. 'But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've forgotten everything.' She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at something she seemed to see in my face. 'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big lawyer out West - Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian must be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married six months after you did. You may have seen it in the papers. The flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.' She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long time. 'Would it be too late,' I asked somewhat timorously, 'to offer you congratulations?' 'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine intrepidity that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the cloth with my thumb-nail. 'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather eagerly - 'a thing I have wanted to know for many years - just from a woman's curiosity, of course - have you ever dared since that night to touch, smell or look at white roses - at white roses wet with rain and dew?' I took a sip of crème de menthe. It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me to repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I regret it.' The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes disdained my words and went travelling by their own route direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in the sound - it was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content - and of misery. I tried to look away from her.