"You really feel that you can make this journey? If you don't, I'll go out and rout out our officer and beg him for another week."
Michael shook his head.
"I'm rather a fraud. Really, you know, I feel perfectly well. Quite excited about this journey, as I told you."
She was chilled by his so impersonally cordial manner and looked at him regretfully.
"Every day he gets farther away," she thought. "In nine years he has been doing nothing but place layer after layer over his sensitiveness. He's a kind of mental coral island. I know that there must still exist a capacity for suffering, but he'll never again let me see it. He wants to convince me of his eternal serenity."
She was looking at him with an unusual intentness, and he turned away in embarrassment, which made her jeer at him to cover her own shyness.
"It was just the reverse of embarrassment, really," he said. "But I don't want to spoil things."
"By doing what?" she demanded.
"Well, if I told you—" He stopped abruptly.
"I have a horror of incomplete or ambiguous conditionals. Now you've begun you must finish."