“I might,” she says, eagerly. “Once I spent a summer camping—in Maine—with just three other people, and I certainly was glad to get back to town. I was so sick of them!”
“Yes, that might give you some idea of it. But don’t misunderstand me. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. After all in the face of certain things, what do people matter? I give you my word—” here your face grows intent as you finger a fork; you seem to have forgotten Dorothy and the dining-room “—a man gets pretty close to the fundamental reason for things, out there. So close that he is perilously near to discovery. What keeps him from going farther? Sometimes he goes too far. Sometimes a boy is sent back home just for going too far—for discovering, or thinking he has discovered.... Fever? Insanity? Truth?”
Dorothy shivers. The tawdry dining-room is forgotten in dark imaginings. Slimy twisted vegetation, slow streams of oily water, houses built on stilts, lifted from the swamp.... Or the monotonous sun of the desert; the undulating, glaring floor of sand with one heroic little clump of tents....
“Would you care to dance?” You have come out of it. She smiles, rather late, and nods. You dance the way they do in those places in Europe, she thinks—slow and romantic, not hopping all over, like Tom.
“When do you start back again?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I won’t know until I get back to New York. They keep these things quiet, of course—international policy, I might say.” For the first time, your smile is for her; a personal thing. “I have a very definite regret that my visit is so short. It’s an unaccustomed feeling. The last time I saw civilization—let’s see, it must have been four years ago—I was positively glad to go back. Where do they keep you young girls? Are you always at school? Ah, well—thank education for our salvation!”
It is difficult to imagine you at a movie, she thinks. You go, however, and sit through a news weekly, a very old domestic comedy, at which you laugh quite surprisingly hard, and half a problem picture before you give it up.
“I say,” you suddenly announce, “stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Simply driving somewhere would be better than this. Or have you a rule about cars and that sort of thing?”
“I suppose we must have, but no one ever pays any attention to it.”
You must drive a good way before the Sunday traffic is at last left behind.