“Promise not to be horrid, and I will.”
“I won’t—I promise I won’t.”
“Then it’s—it’s him—the ‘stranger who might’—you know. And I really should have told you, though there wasn’t anything to tell, only—don’t laugh.”
“I’m not. Can’t you see I’m not? Only what?”
“Well, when I spoke to him that day in the train, I said, ‘Why shouldn’t we talk?’ And he said, ‘I—I—I—be—be—be—because I stammer so.’ And he did. You never heard anything like it. It was awful. He took hours to get out those few words, and I didn’t know where to look. And I felt such a brute because of the things we’d said about him, that I had no sense left; and I told him straight out how I’d wondered he never even said he wondered how late the train was when we were waiting for the 9.1, and I was glad it was stammering and not disagreeableness. And then I said I wasn’t glad he stammered, but so sorry; and he was awfully nice about it, and I told him about that man who cured your brother Cecil of stammering, and he went to him at once: and he’s almost all right now.”
“Good gracious!” said Molly. “Are you sure—but why didn’t he get cured long ago?”
“He had a mother: she stammered frightfully—after the shock of his father’s death, or something, and he got into the way of it from her. And—anyway he didn’t. I think it was so as not to hurt his mother’s feelings, or something. I don’t quite understand. And he said it didn’t seem to matter when she was dead. And he’s an artist. He sells his pictures too, and he teaches. He has a studio in Chelsea.”
“It all sounds a little thin; but if you’re pleased, I’m sure I am.”
“I am,” said Nina.
“But what did he say when he asked you?”