“Oh yes!” cried Halliday. “Oh, how perfectly splendid. Why, I’ve got one in my pocket. I’m sure I have.”
He took out various papers from his pocket book.
“I’m sure I’ve—hic! Oh dear!—got one.”
Gerald and Gudrun were watching absorbedly.
“Oh yes, how perfectly—hic!—splendid! Don’t make me laugh, Pussum, it gives me the hiccup. Hic!—” They all giggled.
“What did he say in that one?” the Pussum asked, leaning forward, her dark, soft hair falling and swinging against her face. There was something curiously indecent, obscene, about her small, longish, dark skull, particularly when the ears showed.
“Wait—oh do wait! No-o, I won’t give it to you, I’ll read it aloud. I’ll read you the choice bits,—hic! Oh dear! Do you think if I drink water it would take off this hiccup? Hic! Oh, I feel perfectly helpless.”
“Isn’t that the letter about uniting the dark and the light—and the Flux of Corruption?” asked Maxim, in his precise, quick voice.
“I believe so,” said the Pussum.
“Oh is it? I’d forgotten—hic!—it was that one,” Halliday said, opening the letter. “Hic! Oh yes. How perfectly splendid! This is one of the best. ‘There is a phase in every race—’” he read in the sing-song, slow, distinct voice of a clergyman reading the Scriptures, “‘When the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire. In the individual, this desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the self’—hic!—” he paused and looked up.