With her customary resistance to the rose-tinted, Chloe would therefore probably have shrugged a declaration off with a joke, not because she did not want to hear it, but because any formulation would have seemed dangerously close both to complete cliché and total nakedness. It was not that Chloe was unsentimental, she was just too discreet with her emotions to speak about them in the worn, social language of the romantic. Though her feelings may have been directed toward me, in a curious sense, they were not for me to know.