He did not answer me. His mouth twitched at the corners, and he had an attack of that irritation which, he says, is relieved and expressed by laughter. Yet the face shone.
The laughter, however, was a very quick, full, natural answer, all the same. It was happy and enthusiastic. I saw that laughter made his rhythms bigger at once. Then laughter was probably the means to use. It was a sort of bridge.
"Your instantaneous comprehension of our things puzzles me," he said. "You grasp our affairs in all their relations so swiftly. Yet it is all new to you." His voice and face made me wish to stroke and help him, he was so dear and eager. "How do you manage it?" he asked point blank. "Our things are surely foreign to your nature."
"But they are of children," I told him. "They are small and so very simple. There are no difficulties. Your language is block letters because your self-expression, as you call it, is so limited. It all comes to me at a glance. I and my kind can remember a million tiniest details without effort."
He did not laugh, but his face looked full of questions. I could not help him further. "A scrap, probably, of what you've taught us," I heard him mumble, though no further questions came. "Well," he went on presently, while I lay and watched the pale fire slip in tiny waves about his eyes, "remember this: since our alphabet is so easy to you, follow it, stick to it, do not go outside it. There's a good rule that will save trouble for others as well as for yourself."
"I remember and I try. But it is not always easy. I get so cramped and stiff and lifeless with it."
"This sunless, chilly England, of course, cannot feed you," he said. "The sense of beauty in our Race, too, is very poor."
Once he suddenly looked up and fixed his eyes on my face. His manner became very earnest.
"Now, listen to me," he said. "I'm going to read you something; I want you to tell me what you make of it. It's private; that is, I have no right to show it to others, but as no one would understand it—with the exception possibly of yourself—secrecy is not of importance." And his mouth twitched a little.
He drew a sheaf of papers from an inner pocket, and I saw they were covered with fine writing. I laughed; this writing always made me laugh—it was so laborious and slow. The writing I knew best, of course, lay all over and inside the earth and skies. The privacy also made me laugh, so strange seemed the idea to me, and so impossible—this idea of secrecy. It was such an admission of ignorance.