"It doesn't seem to me to matter much."
"It used to make me feel that nothing was any use. As if I was just a grain of dust."
Her eyes came slowly down and rested on him in a musing gaze.
"A grain of dust. I never felt that way. I shouldn't think you'd like it, but I don't see why you were afraid."
David felt uncomfortable. She was so exceedingly practical and direct that he had an unpleasant feeling she would set him down as a coward, who went about under the fear that a meteor might fall on him and strike him dead. He tried to explain:
"Not afraid actually, just sort of frozen by the idea of it all. It's so—immense, so—so crushing and terrible."
Her gaze continued, a questioning quality entering it. This gained in force by a slight tilting of her head to one side. David began to fear her next question. It might show that she regarded him not only as a coward but also as a fool.
"Perhaps you don't understand," he hazarded timidly.
"I don't think I do," she answered, then dropped her eyes and added after a moment of pondering, "I can't remember ever being really afraid of anything."
Had it been daylight she would have noticed that the young man colored. He thought guiltily of certain haunting fears of his childhood, ghosts in the attic, a banshee of which he had once heard a fearsome story, a cow that had chased him on the farm. She unconsciously assisted him from this slough of shame by saying suddenly: