"You see," I said quickly, "I'm sorry if you think I'm mad, but—but she was crying, and now she is happy. She will be awfully happy all day."
I'm never sorry for the impulsive things I do, but I am nearly always sorry because people don't understand. It seems to me like rubbing all the lovely bloom off a butterfly's wing just to demonstrate that it is a butterfly.
"I don't think you're mad," he said, smiling.
If I had had anklets as well as bracelets I could have given them away this morning. He helped me down at the station; he was just a little constrained, so I knew he was feeling tremendously full of feeling, just as I was.
"Modern life doesn't give a fellow much of a chance. I have rather absurd notions about you at this minute—I should like to be Sir Walter Raleigh, and put my cloak down for you to walk on. You don't know how humble you make me feel, Pamela Burbridge."
I felt myself sort of melting towards him.
"What can I do to show you how splendid I think you are?" he said. "You wonderful small person!"
And something inside me wanted to say, "Exchange all this chivalrous gratitude for just a tiny bit of love"; but I sat on the something's head hard, like a good girl, and I said:
"Why, you can get me my ticket; the booking-office is open now."
There is nothing more cheerless and depressing than going to a place you don't know and arriving all alone. If only there is a pillar-box in the vicinity where you have once posted a letter, or a tea-shop where you bought chocolates, it establishes a feeling of intimacy. At Long Woodstock I felt an alien of aliens, an Englishwoman in a foreign country.