Dr. Fillery, as he was called, looked at me steadily, his mouth twitching at the corners as before, a flash of fire flitting through his eyes. The fire made me like and trust him; the twitching, too, I liked, for it meant he knew how absurd he was. Yet he was bigger than the other figures.
"You can't do that," he said, "you mustn't," and then laughed outright. "It isn't done, you know—here."
"Why not, sir?" I asked, using the terms the figures used. "I feel like that."
"Of course, you do. But all you feel can't be expressed except at the proper times and places. The consent of the other party always is involved," he went on slowly, "when it's a question of expressing—anything you feel."
This puzzled me, because in this particular instance the other party had asked me with her eyes to comfort her. I told him this. He laughed still more. Caught by the sound—it was just like wind passing among tall grasses on a mountain ridge—I forgot what he was talking about for the moment. The sound carried me away towards my own rhythms.
"You've got such amazing insight," he went on tinkling to himself, for I heard, although I did not listen. "You read the heart too easily, too quickly. You must learn to hide your knowledge." The laughter which ran with the words then ended, and I came back to the last thing I had definitely listened to—"express, expressing," was the phrase he used.
"You told me that self-expression is the purpose for which I'm here——?"
"I believe it is," he agreed, more solemnly.
"Only sometimes, then?"
"Exactly. If that expression involves another in pain or trouble or discomfort——"