“Yes.”
There was another long silence, then,
“Oh, indeed,” said T. X.
Again the unbroken interval of quiet and after a while she said in a low voice, “Not that way.”
“Not what way!” asked T. X. huskily, his spirits doing a little mountaineering.
“The way you mean,” she said.
“Oh,” said T. X.
He was back again amidst the rosy snows of dawn, was in fact climbing a dizzy escalier on the topmost height of hope's Mont Blanc when she pulled the ladder from under him.
“I shall, of course, never marry,” she said with a certain prim decision.
T. X. fell with a dull sickening thud, discovering that his rosy snows were not unlike cold, hard ice in their lack of resilience.