She had wanted, wanted so to be alone with him: she had a desperate feeling that there were urgent things to be said, and now she could utter nothing. Her mind ran zigzagging beside her, like a questing dog, while she tried to steer their talk into some channel of reality. Her thoughts kept crowding massively under her uneasy words, pushing them out before they were ready, cutting into her speech like italics in a page of swarthy Roman type.
“We all eat too much in hot weather, I dare say. Oh, if I could only write him a letter I could make him understand. He’s so sophisticated, I suppose the quaint things he says are his way of making fun of me. Why did I suggest our walking like this? You can’t see a person’s face when you’re walking side by side. And if we go round the path again, Lizzie will get me from the pantry. Let’s sit down on the bench.”
“It’s wet, it’ll spoil your pretty skirt.”
Skirt!... What a word for this mist of silvery tissue she had put on specially for him....
“So it is. Well, let’s see what the storm has done to the roses.”
The little walk under the trellis was flaked with wet petals.
“Poor darlings, there’s not much left of them now. If Shakespeare was here I should feel the same way. Speechless. Why, he’s like a god: lovely to think about, impossible to talk to. He doesn’t give anything, just absorbs you: you feel like a drop of ink on a blotter. I have a horrid suspicion that the ice has given out, you mustn’t mind if your cocktail is warm.”
He kept looking at her in brief glances. Each time she met them it was like getting a letter in some familiar handwriting but stamped with a strange postmark.
“Are they better cold?”
I give up, I give up. It’s no use. I can’t even think. There’s some sort of veil, mist, between us. He is a kind of god. He’s brightness, beauty. Every movement he makes is a revelation and a question. How can I speak to him when all I want is to love him. There’s nothing earthy, nothing gross about this. It’s lovelier than anything I ever dreamed of. And if I tried to tell any one it would sound like tawdry farce....