'I am sure I could never bear pain,' she said, smiling. 'I should tell everything at once! I should never make a good conspirator. I suppose you must have been wounded once or twice, when you were young. Tell me, did it hurt very much?'
He let her hand fall as he answered, and she drew it back and hid it under her wide sleeve.
'A cut with a sharp sword feels like a stream of icy-cold water,' he answered. 'A thrust through the flesh pricks like a big thorn, and pricks again when the point comes out on the other side. One feels very little, or nothing at all, if one is badly wounded in the head, for one is stunned at once; it is the headache afterwards that really hurts. If one is wounded in the lungs, one feels nothing, but one is choked by the blood, and one must turn on one's face at once in order not to suffocate. Broken bones hurt afterwards as a rule, more than at first, but it is a curious sensation to have one's collar bone smashed by a blow from a two-handed sword——'
'Good heavens!' cried Zoë. 'What a catalogue! How do you know how each thing feels?'
'I can remember,' Zeno answered simply.
'You have been wounded in all those different ways, and you are alive?'
Zeno smiled.
'Yes; and you understand now why I look so old.'
'I was not in earnest,' Zoë said. 'You knew that I was not. You need only look at yourself in a mirror to see that I was laughing.'
'I was not very deeply hurt by being taken for a man of fifty,' Zeno answered, not quite truthfully.