She said not a word to me. That is so wise in women. However wrong in fact their guessing may be, there is a fundamental instinct of right about it which tells them what the circumstances demand. A man, guessing as she had been, would have poured questions upon me, asking me what I thought of Clarissa, and not because he was curious, but only to find out if he were right. Now, a woman never does that. To begin with, she knows she is right, and, filled as she is with curiosity, she asks no questions. She just finds out.
So Bellwattle said nothing. She just let me think. And over and over again I thought: "Will she go home if I tell her to? Will she go home if I tell her to?"
But there was a little thought that kept creeping in between each one of those questions. "Will she ever go home if I tell her to?" I said to myself, and then I thought how warm that letter would be when, in the secrecy of her bedroom, Clarissa should take it from her dress to read. And the more I asked myself the one, the more I pictured to myself the other.
"It's the very devil," said I at last to Bellwattle, "when you can't think the thing you want to think."
"Do you think you really want to?" said she.
Now, what the devil did she mean?
CHAPTER XII
Three days have run by, and only that I have had no word from Clarissa, I have scarcely been conscious of their passing. Three days, and we have come into a new month, a more wonderful month even than that through which we have just passed; the most wonderful month in the year, were it not that June, July, August, September and October all follow after it.
I watched a lark this morning rise from a tuft of thick sea-grass, such as grows out on the slopes of the cliffs. The whole sea was of quicksilver, throwing back the bright light of a glorious sun. It spread far out to the line of sky, and they met in that haze of heat which makes the horizon so full of mystery. A mile out from shore a mass of gulls were crooshting, filling the distance with their hunger-cries as they flung themselves into the mêlée fighting for their food. I lay watching them, and even from that distance I could see the black body of a cormorant in their midst, diving and diving again, where the gulls could only feed upon the surface. He reminded me of the people who eat in the London restaurants, who have five meals a day; the people who are able to dive into their pockets and pay for food they never want, while the match-sellers and the flower-sellers, the crossing-sweepers and the beggars outside are whispering their hunger cries like the gulls upon the surface.
"I've come to the conclusion that I don't like the cormorant," I said to Bellwattle.