Peter looked from her to the portrait and back again.
“All of you,” he said. “The reality of you: the rest is quite unlike. You haven’t got mouth and nose and forehead and hair and chin the least like that. But the person inside is horribly like you.”
Silvia put her arm through his.
“Horribly?” she said. “Thanks so much.”
“I didn’t say—just then—that you were horrible,” said he. “I said horribly like you, your parody, your caricature. I wonder how I dared ask such a masterful young woman to marry me.”
“You knew it would be good for you,” said Silvia. “It was far more daring of me to accept you.”
“There’s just time for you to remedy your mistake,” said he. “Positively the last chance.”
This frank kind of chaffing talk, as between friends rather than lovers, had grown to be characteristic of their privacy. Silvia delighted in it: it had the charm of some cipher about it; the blunt commonplace words held for her a secret meaning known to the two utterers of them, which was only to be expressed by these symbols. When she feigned to misunderstand Peter, and thanked him for calling her horrible, there lay below her foolish words a treasure which words were quite powerless to express. Or when he just now wondered that he had dared to ask her to marry him, she felt that he conveyed something which no amount of impassioned speech could have indicated so well. From the hilltops there flashed the signal that no voice could convey. Then sometimes, as now, she had to use another symbol, which again was only a symbol, and with her hands tremblingly, eagerly, shyly clasping him round the neck, she drew his head down towards her, not kissing him, but simply looking close into his eyes.
“Positively the last chance!” she said. “Oh, Peter, what a fool I am about you. Doesn’t it bore you frightfully?”
“Frightfully,” said Peter, keeping to the first code of symbols.