“I’ll tell you all you want to know in that quarter, and tell you straight.” He pinned her with his direct look.
She tried to retrieve his misconception of her meaning.
“Oh,” she said, “you can’t. You would have to show me.”
They whirled under the cypresses at the entrance to the golf-links. The club-house, so low, and so widely roofed with tiles that it appeared to crouch under a red umbrella, gave them just the glimmer of the upper row of its windows over the hill-crest.
“And how long a time will it take to show you?” said Holden.
It came to her how unescapable he was; what significance had his direct mind read into her replies? She was grave, with a certain distress and indecision in her face.
“I can’t tell. I mean you must not ask me to—you must not expect—I cannot—”
But he would not have it.
“Oh, well, if time’s what you want!”
“Do you go at your deals as hard as this?” she smiled.