"You—!"
"I'm not half as funny as you are, but I don't laugh at you."
"Y—you w-would if you didn't p-pity me so much," she gasped between giggles.
"I don't pity you at all. And I think you're extremely foolish to laugh so much at nothing."
"Even when I'm laughing at y-you?"
She had taken out her handkerchief and now composed herself with difficulty while Jerry's ruffled dignity in silence preened at its feathers. She watched him furtively, I'm sure, between dabs with her handkerchief and at last stopped laughing, got up and offered him her hand.
"I've made you angry," she said. "I'm sorry."
He found that he had taken her hand and was looking at it. The words he used in describing it were these: "It was small, soft and warm, Roger, and seemed alive with vitality, but it was timid, too, like a young thrush just fallen from its nest." So far as I could discover, he didn't seem to know what to do with her hand, and before he decided anything she had withdrawn it abruptly and was turning away.
"I'm going now," she said calmly. "But I've enjoyed being here, awfully. It was very nice of you not to—to throw me over the wall."
"I wouldn't have, really," he protested.