“Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?”
“Everything, with my part of it.” What possessed her, she wondered afterward, to say what she said next? “I never wanted to come here.”
“That so? We’ve been thinking it rather nice.”
In spite of herself, she was mollified. “It isn’t quite that, either,” she explained. “I’ve only just discovered the real trouble, 62 myself. What makes me so mad isn’t altogether the fact that I didn’t want to come up here. It’s that I hadn’t any choice. I had to come.”
The boy’s eyes twinkled. “So that’s what’s bothering you, is it? Cheer up! You had the choice of how you’d come, didn’t you?”
“How?”
“Yes. Sometimes I think that’s all the choice they give us in this world. It’s all I’ve had, anyway—how I’d do a thing.”
“You mean, gracefully or—”
“I mean—”
“Hello!” said Stannard’s voice. “What are you two chinning about before the cows come home?”