“Then listen to it this time. You’ve absolutely been turning your back on me. You are piqued—horrid word—because I don’t want to remain an old maid for your sake. Mayn’t I feel interested in you without your resenting it? You object to my marrying Philip when you could have made it perfectly clear——”
“What could I have made clear?” he asked.
“You could have made yourself indispensable to me,” she said. “A single further turn of the screw——”
“No, I’m wronging you,” she said. “That final turn of the screw must be made mutually. It never came to us, though I was there, wasn’t I, with my screwdriver, and you with yours? It just didn’t happen. Let’s make the best of what remains. A good deal remains after all. We have everything that is of value between us, except that final turn of the screw. Good heavens, Peter, how I wish I adored you! I do all but that. And you do the same for me, darling, when all is said and done. If only you were masterful and masculine, or if only I were, the thing would be solved. As it is, we are like two oysters in the flow of the tide, just gaping at each other.”
Nellie’s ultimate objective, unless Peter had completely misunderstood her, had sunk out of sight for him.
“And all the time the tide is flowing,” he said; “that’s so maddening of it. I mean that the days and weeks and months are passing, and one doesn’t even think, still less does one feel; one only exists. I am an oyster, it’s quite true. But I don’t make pearls. Pearls, I believe, are only pieces of grit which the clever oyster covers up with iridescent stuff. All that stuff comes from the oyster’s inside, somehow. I can’t make; I can’t manufacture like that. The clever oyster does it, or the normal oyster, somewhere in the South Seas. I suppose I’m a northern oyster—only meant to be eaten. Just to be eaten. I really want somebody to come along and gobble me up. I’m nothing but a small piece of food.”
Nellie found herself hugely interested in this. It gave her what she wanted to know—namely, Peter’s own personal estimate as to how he stood to Silvia. He had defined it negatively when he told her that he was not in love with her; but here was a more intimate revelation—namely, that of his willingness to be absorbed. There, too, was the difference, vital and essential, between herself and him, for she never contemplated the possibility of being absorbed by Philip. There would certainly be no absorption there on either side; he, so she judged, was as little likely to make that surrender as she.
For a moment she thought over what he had said, instantly finding herself unable to accept it.
“I can imagine your being very indigestible,” she remarked. “I don’t really think, nor, perhaps, do you, that you will allow yourself to be assimilated. I can’t imagine you giving up your wet woods.”