Quoted By:
Now it so happened that she had never—never, at least, in adult life—spoken to him by phone; hence the phone had preserved the very essence, the bright vibration, of her vocal cords, the little “leap” in her larynx, the laugh clinging to the contour of the phrase, as if afraid in girlish glee to slip off the quick words it rode. It was the timbre of their past, as if the past had put through that call, a miraculous connection (“Ardis, one eight eight six”—comment? Non, non, pas huitante-huit—huitante-six). Goldenly, youthfully, it bubbled with all the melodious characteristics he knew—or better say recollected, at once, in the sequence they came: that entrain, that whelming of quasi-erotic pleasure, that assurance and animation—and, what was especially delightful, the fact that she was utterly and innocently unaware of the modulations entrancing him.
There had been trouble with her luggage.
