“I shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “I love it too much. Those trees. They look so surprised. I have a guilty passion for pine trees.”
Driving the faithful car had strengthened George. Even the paltriest has an encouraged sense of competence with that steady tattoo underneath his feet. The artist that lay printed like a fossil in George’s close-packed heart—the artist that only Joyce had ever relished—always responded to the drum of the engine. He adored the car; when he drove alone to the Island (sending the family by train) he sang to her most of the way. This was his guilty passion. Now it was the car’s rhyming vitality that came to his rescue. He broke the glass. He cut himself, but he got through.
“Any kind of love is too much,” he said.
Then he was grieved to find himself uttering such a cheap oracle; but it comforted Joyce because she saw it was a symptom. It showed that he was trying to tell the truth. She did not dare look at him: she was too conscious of the others behind them, who seemed as massively attentive as an audience in a theatre. Then in a wave of annoyance, Surely I have a right to look where I want? She did so. She could see the confidential tilt of his eyebrow so plainly, she knew he was hers for the taking. Nothing but themselves could stand between them.
“How queer: that’s just what I was thinking,” she told the eyebrow.
“Oh, do you believe in telepathy?” chirped Ruth. “Ben sometimes knows exactly what I’m thinking without my saying a word.”
It can’t happen often, George thought.
“What were you laughing at?” he found time to ask her, as the others were descending from the car.
“I was just thinking, there’s not much danger of my meeting God, because I’m not pure in heart.”