"They helped you through one fortnight."
"They didn't. It was a fortnight of horror."
"Well. Go on."
"You said I would be punished by being dull. Have I been dull?"
"My dear, as though if you had been you would ever confess it."
"That's true. But as a matter of fact let me tell you that I never spent a happier summer."
He merely looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
"If I remember rightly," he said, after a pause, "your chief reason for wishing to be solitary was that your soul might have time to grow. May I ask if it did?"
"Not a bit."
He laughed, and, getting up, came and stood by my side before the fire.
"At least you are honest," he said, drawing my hand through his arm.