He said, "I tell you what, Nona. I'll tell you something. I've an idea sometimes of cutting out from all this place and starting an educational publishing business on my own."
She was enormously interested. "Oh, Marko, if only you would!"
"Well, I think about it. I do. I can see a biggish thing in it. The Tidborough Press, I'd call it. Like the University Press, you know, Oxford and Cambridge. By Jove, it might go any distance, you know!"
"Oh, you must! You must!"
He began to pour out the tremendous and daring scheme.
VI
He talked animatedly,—these long pent up enthusiasms. She attended, rapt and gleaming-eyed, following him with most delicious "Yes—yes" and with little nods; and he suddenly became aware of how poignant to him was the sympathy of her interest,—and stopped. Thus to pour out, thus to be heard, was to experience the exquisite pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable pain, as when an anodyne steals through the veins of torture. He stopped. He could not bear it.
"Well, that's all," he said.
She declared, "It's splendid. How well you're doing, Marko. I knew you would." She paused. "Not that that matters," she said.
He asked her, "What do you mean—'not that that matters'?"