They could be silent, too. Pauses were not awkward.
“You gather so much fineness together, Marian,” he remarked once. “All that you touch becomes fine, turns to gold.” He ceased abruptly. That was the wrong allusion, he thought, annoyed at his clumsiness.
But she did not seem to mind it. “You’re really quite kindly toward me, aren’t you, Stacey?” she replied, with perhaps just a hint of irony in her voice, but smiling pleasantly.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
“No reason at all, of course,” she said prettily, making him a mocking little bow. “Have some more tea.”
He held out his cup, watched her fill it, then set it down again, all mechanically. “People get in states of mind—for no particular reason,” he said vaguely, feeling apologetic yet not wanting to go into the matter—as much on her account as on his.
“Yes, and then into others. Tell me:—do you feel kindly toward everybody now?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t go so far as to claim that!” he replied uncomfortably. It went against his whole nature to talk about himself to Marian, yet he felt he owed her some sort of confession. So he went on haltingly. “I used to get awfully worked up about a lot of things—about people being greedy, for instance. I don’t mean any one person—everybody, whole human race. But then,” he concluded diffidently, “it struck me that they weren’t hateful on account of it, but only pathetic, since their greed never brought them happiness—never!”
Marian’s face was half turned away from him and she was resting her chin in her cupped hand—an old familiar pose—so that he could not see her expression. But all at once she dropped her hand, lay back in her chair, and laughed musically, startling him.
“Oh, Stacey, you’re so funny!” she exclaimed. “I’ve told you that before. But I think,” she added, not laughing now, smiling at him deliberately, “that I liked you better in your fierce, world-defying, Byronic stage, when you were so dramatic, than now in this Christ-like phase.”