"I don't quite know how to—to—" she replied.
I looked around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too expensive to keep."
"I know," she breathed.
Taking the bit in my teeth, I said, "Catherine even though—well, heck. I'd like to help you."
"You mean that?" she asked in almost an eager voice.
"It's not impossible to forget that we were eloping when all this started."
"It all seems so long ago," she said with a thick voice. "And I wish we were back there—no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom's Disease had never happened—I wish—"
"Stop wishing and think," I told her half-humorously. "If there were no Mekstrom's Disease, the chances are that we'd never have met in the first place."
"That's the cruel part of it all," she cried. And I mean cried.
I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. "So here we are," I said unhappily. "I can't help you now, Catherine."