The last words of Alice confused me. . . . I did not know what to say.
'I was kept,' she went on; 'I was watched.'
'Who could keep you?'
'Where would you like to go?' inquired Alice, as usual not answering my question.
'Take me to Italy — to that lake, you remember.'
Alice turned a little away, and shook her head in refusal. At that point I noticed for the first time that she had ceased to be transparent. And her face seemed tinged with colour; there was a faint glow of red over its misty whiteness. I glanced at her eyes . . . and felt a pang of dread; in those eyes something was astir — with the slow, continuous, malignant movement of the benumbed snake, twisting and turning as the sun begins to thaw it.
'Alice,' I cried, 'who are you? Tell me who you are.'
Alice simply shrugged her shoulders.
I felt angry . . . I longed to punish her; and suddenly the idea occurred to me to tell her to fly with me to Paris. 'That 's the place for you to be jealous,' I thought. 'Alice,' I said aloud, 'you are not afraid of big towns — Paris, for instance?'
'No.'
'Not even those parts where it is as light as in the boulevards?'
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