“And the things I know you must have done for my mother,” he went on. “Those are the things that I appreciate more than any. It is not every woman who would even think of them, let alone do them.”
Why would he force her into this attitude of perpetual lying? she thought. It was becoming worse and worse. Why was he so straightforward and so blind? Could he not see that she loved him? Was he one of those cold and passionless men upon whom no woman ever exerts an intense influence?
Though she did not know it, she expressed the whole fault in her system. A man reared in a more complex community than a fishing village would have divined her scheme, and the result would have been a prolonged but most delightful duel of wits and hearts.
But Code, by the very directness of his honesty, 216 and simplicity of his nature, cut through the gauzy wrappings of this delectable package and went straight to its heart. And there he found nothing, because what little of the deeply genuine there lay in this woman’s restless nature was disguised and shifted at the will of her caprice.
When Code had experienced the pleasure of lighting a genuine clear Havana cigar after many months of abstinence, she leaned across the table to him, her hands clasped before her.
“Code, what does loneliness represent to you?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he temporized, taken aback. “I don’t go in for loneliness much; but when I do, why all I want is––well, let me see, a good game of quoits with the boys in front of the church, or a talk with my mother about how rich we are going to be some day when I get that partnership in the fishstand. I’m too busy to be lonely.”
“And I’m too lonely to be busy!” He looked at her unbelievingly.
“You!” he cried. “Why, you have everything in the world; you can go anywhere, do anything, have the people about you that you want. You, lonely? I don’t understand you.”
“Well, I’ll put it another way. Did you ever want something so hard that it hurt, and couldn’t get it?”