"Why, you poor boy. How terribly hard you've been working," she said. And she looked at me as though I were sick and worn to the bone. The end of it was that I accepted delightedly an invitation to spend a week up at their cottage on the Sound.
Those were seven vivid glowing days. I could not relax, I was too intensely happy, I had too much to tell her, not only about my work but about a host of other things that without rhyme or reason popped into my mind and had to be said. The range of our talk was tremendous, and the wider we ranged the closer we drew. For she too was telling things, and her things were as unexpected as mine and infinitely more absorbing. Her manner toward me had quite changed. It was that of a nurse with an invalid, she frankly ordered me about.
"Why can't you lie back on those cushions?" she asked one morning when we were out in her boat. "You ought to be dozing half the day—and instead you're as wide awake as an owl."
"I am," I admitted happily. "I'm trying to see everything." The chic little hat and the blouse she wore were adorably fresh from Paris, and as I watched her run her boat I could feel flowing into my body and soul a perfectly boundless store of new life.
"I've been thinking you over," she said.
"Have you?" I asked delightedly. I had often wondered if she had. "What do you think?" I inquired.
Eleanore frowned perplexedly.
"You're such a queer combination," she said. "You have such ridiculous ups and downs. To-day you're way up, aren't you."
"I am," I said very earnestly. She looked off placidly over the Sound.
"You're so very sensitive," she went on. "You let things take hold of you so hard. And yet on the other hand you seem to be so very——" she hesitated for a word.