He made no reply.
“Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean.” And she dodged aside into phrases—the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little.
“I meant you and me,” he said, biting out his words.
“Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn’t be more wonderful. Could we?”
“I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can’t help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: ‘How wonderful we are!’”
That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet.
“Oh, I never thought——”
She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her.
“What did you never think?”