“Is there nothing I can do to entertain you? I might recite. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“You give me the horrors,” he blurted. “No, no I’m sorry. I’m unstrung, that’s all. Please do be serious. We’ve got to think of what we shall do.”
“Who are we?”
“I beg your pardon. You, then,” he amended.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Agnes, do for....”
“Mrs. Thane, please.”
“I don’t expect you to be amiable,” he said, “but please for one moment be reasonable.”
“When they are like that you can’t do anything with them,” she said. “Really you can’t. You will have to see my husband.”
She had seated herself on a grassy bench with her back to the fence, her feet in the dry ditch, and was viciously jabbing the earth with a limber stick. She threw the stick from her, leaned back, folded her arms and tilted her chin at the sky, with an air of casting John out of existence. He had given up trying to talk and stood observing her in an overt manner. It was thus he saw how she looked at the moon, first vacantly without seeing it, then with a start as of recognition or recollection, and at length with an expression of such twisted mocking wistfulness that he knew one shape of her heart and turned wretchedly away, almost wishing he had not seen.