"Go on," she said. "I apologize!"
"I dreamed we were children together, and playmates," he continued. "We
were not at all happy together, but still we were playmates. There was
nothing we did not quarrel about. You were disagreeable, and I was
spiteful. Our greatest dispute was over a Christmas-tree. And that was
odd, too, for I have never seen a Christmas-tree."
"Well?" she said, for he had paused. "What a long time you take to tell
story."
"You were not called Bernardine," he said. "You were called by some
ordinary sensible name. I don't remember what. But you were very
disagreeable. That I remember well. At last you disappeared, and I went
about looking for you 'If I can find something to cause a quarrel,'
I said to myself, 'she will come back.' So I went and smashed your
doll's head. But you did not come back. Then I set on fire your doll's
house. But even that did not bring you back. Nothing brought you back.
That was my dream. I hope you are not offended. Not that it makes any
difference if you are."
Bernardine laughed.
"I am sorry that I should have been such an unpleasant playmate," she
said. "It was a good thing I did disappear."
"Perhaps it was," he said. "There would have been a terrible scene about
that doll's head. An odd thing for me to dream about Christmas-trees and
dolls and playmates: especially when I went to sleep thinking about my
new camera."
"You have a new camera?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered, "and a beauty, too. Would you like to see it?"
She expressed a wish to see it, and when they reached the Kurhaus, she
went with him up to his beautiful room, where he spent his time in the
company of his microscope and his chemical bottles and his photographic
possessions.
"If you sit down and look at those photographs, I will make you some
tea," he said. "There is the camera, but please not to touch it until I
am ready to show it myself."
She watched him preparing the tea; he did everything so daintily, this
Disagreeable Man. He put a handkerchief on the table, to serve for an
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