"What the devil are you…?"
"Sh!" Ruth tiptoed over. "I know I'm breaking my promise. But I had to talk to you alone."
This was the Ruth he had known on Thursday night, and for so long: the dark-brown eyes softened and upturned, the hps half parted, that sense of "niceness" which so many persons found impossible to describe. Her sweater-and-slacks costume, Martin observed for the first time, became her very well. She looked at the iron door.
"Can Stan hear us?"
"I don't think so, unless you shout. The door of the — that place is thick oak, and he's got it closed. Where are the others?"
"They went home. I knew / was perfectly at home, if I had a lamp and that thread guide-line." Ruth's smooth forehead slightly wrinkled; a smile curved up the corner of her lip. "Sit down," she invited, "and move over. Have you a cigarette?"
Martin put down the light in its old position with Ruth's lamp beside it, and lit cigarettes for both of them. With his eyes becoming accustomed to near-darkness, he could see that the paper-mountains had been built up on the side of windows. He was acutely conscious of something else: Ruth's physical nearness.
"I suppose,'' Ruth said softly, when the cigarette had several times pulsed and darkened, "you thought I behaved very badly today?"
He had forgotten all about it "No, not in the least" "Well, I did."
"Never mind your behaviour. Why didn’t you ever tell me you knew Jenny? You knew I'd been searching for three years