"Didn't your friend hear what she said?"
"My—oh, you mean Father Bland. No, he didn't."
"Is he deaf?"
"Yes, a little." She heard the righteous reproach; it must have done Jim good to put her in the wrong. "What did she say?"
"She said: 'Go away, my love!'"
He would be still there. She heard breathing, and the background noise, a hot trumpet squeaking up the summits of banality. She said: "Jim, do you still love her at all?"
But how could she know the color of the word in his language? How was he to glimpse the meanings of it in her own? If even Sam Grainger couldn't quite admit that divergence of language long ago (my own language far simpler then!) if not even Sam (where are you?) then how could poor Jim Doherty who had no wish to think for himself?
"What else did she say?" Hadn't Jim heard the idiot question?
It seemed to her the question had been divided, an echo-voice asking of another with another name: Sam (where are you?) do you still love her (the name was Red-Top, remember?) or think of her at all? Meanwhile—"She said nothing else, Jim, nothing I heard."
"Oh. I—look, I never told her—I mean—oh, I don't know. I—" Edith held the receiver further away with its wiry babble of misery: "I tried to make her understand—that part, all in her head—she—"