“Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?” she asked submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows one’s pride and surrenders. “Will you tell me?” she repeated, leaning over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain.
“Why do you make me so unhappy?” she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.
“Make you unhappy?” echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. “But I don’t. I make you uncommonly happy.”
“You make me miserable,” she answered.
“Well, in that case,” said Calamy, “I’d better go away and leave you in peace.” He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were really preparing to go.
But Mary enfolded him in her arms. “No, no,” she implored. “Don’t go. You mustn’t be cross with me. I’m sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me, please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested. Really, really.” She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at the Royal Institution lecture.
Calamy couldn’t help laughing. “You’ve succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,” he said. “I’d find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.”
“Please, please,” Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves….
“You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,” Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly—for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious.
“Well, you see,” he started hesitatingly, “it’s like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist—my hand for example.”