She leant across the table again. "I never mean to be tiresome," she said.
"Little star," he said stoutly.
"It's always involuntary, my tiresomeness," she said, addressing him earnestly. "Oh, but it's so involuntary—and the dull surfaces I know I have, and the scaly imperfections—"
He knocked the ashes off his cigarette with unnecessary vigour, almost as though they were bits of an annoying relative's body.
"I'm warped, and encrusted, and blundering," went on Ingeborg, who was always thorough when it came to adjectives.
In his irritable state, to have her abjectly cheapening herself vexed him as much as everything else she had done that day had vexed him. He might, under provocation, point out her weaknesses, but she must not point them out to him. He wanted to worship her, and she persisted in preventing him. Distressing to have a god who refuses to sit quiet on its pedestal, who insists on skipping off it to show you its shortcomings and beg your pardon. How could he make love to her if she talked like this? It would be like trying to make love to a Prayer-book.
"Is it because it is Sunday," he said, "that you are impelled to acknowledge and confess your faults? You make me feel as if a verger had passed by and pushed me into a pew."
"Well, but I am warped and encrusted and blundering," she persisted.
"You are not!" he said irritably. "Haven't I told you you are my star and my miracle?"
"Yes, but—"