“Here you are!” said a voice. “Thank goodness. I want to ask you things. You’re different.”
It was Martin.
“What’s the matter with all these people?” he exclaimed. “Why can’t they have fun? Why do they keep on telling me they love me? I don’t want to be loved. You can’t be happy when you’re being loved all the time. It’s a nuisance. I want to build castles in the sand and play croquet and draw pictures. I want to go to bed and get a good sleep for the Picnic; and that lady wants me to kiss her. I did it once; isn’t that enough?”
Here was a merriment: to expect her, at this particular junction of here and now, to join his deprecations.
“Quite enough,” she said. “But it depends on the person. She may not think so.”
“It’s Mrs. Phyllis. I asked her if she was ready for me to go to bed, and she said I mustn’t say such things. What’s the matter with her? I think she’s angry. Everybody seems angry. Why is it?”
Her pulses were applauding her private thought: If Phyllis loves him, I can love George.
“And I saw Bunny in the garden. She says you’re the only one who can help me because you almost understand.”
“Bunny! Bunny who? What do you mean?...”
He must be mad. Yet it seemed an intelligible kind of madness: some unrecognized but urgent meaning sang inside it like a sweet old tune. In the misty moonlight she saw the great wheel of Time spinning so fast that its dazzling spokes seemed to shift and rotate backward. But her mind still intoned its own jubilee: If Phyllis loves him, I can love George. It’s all right for me to love George. Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors!