He smiled. “I’m afraid my nervousness is too deeply seated—I may as well admit that I’m nervous—you saw it for yourself––”
“Oh, I saw you was—you were—sick up here—” she touched her forehead—“as soon as you begun to talk to me.”
Grateful for this comprehension he tried to use it to his advantage. “So that you understand how I could go off the hooks––”
“Sure! My mother’d go off ’em the least little thing, till—till she done—till she did—the way I told her.”
“Then some of these days I may ask you to—but just now perhaps we’d better talk about––”
“When I’m to get out.”
Her bluntness of expression hurt him. “That’s not the way I should have put it––”
“But it’s the way you’d ’a’ meant, isn’t it?”
He was the more disconcerted because she said this 139 gently, with the same longing in her face and eyes as in that of the little mermaid bending over the unconscious prince.
The unconscious prince of the moment merely said: “You mustn’t think me more brutal than I am––”