On the next day she divined from his half troubled look at her, and the shy modesty of his manner, that he was wondering whether he had actually babbled last night, or in a mild delirium dreamed the whole thing. Not from 304her might he find out. Her easy, matter-of-fact way made any such passage seem at least unlikely.
Having slept during the night she did not retire to rest during the day, but let Giovanna go about her long neglected affairs and in her place looked after Gerald, who had waked from his deep sleep immensely refreshed. He would not need a constant watcher beside him after this, during night or day.
“What shall I do to amuse you?” she asked him, to make an interruption after she had felt him watching her through half closed lids for some time. “Don’t you want me to read to you?”
“I think not, Aurora. Thank you just as much.”
“Well, then, how shall I entertain you? Do you want me to be a gold-fish for you?”
“How do you ‘be a gold-fish,’ Aurora?”
“Look!” But the instant she changed her face into a gold-fish’s and waggled up through imaginary water, opening and shutting her mouth like a rubber valve, he hid his eyes, crying sharply, “Please stop! I don’t want to see it.”
The gold-fish personality was dropped.
“Very well, then,” she said, with unimpaired serenity, “shall I do a squirrel gnawing a nut? Every family its own circus.”
“If you do it, I will not look. How can you endure, lovely as you are, to make yourself ugly–grotesque?”