“That on our second day you would be satirical.”
He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested:
“I said what I felt. Mayn’t I do that? I didn’t think it would hurt you, really, I didn’t. Linda, I——
“Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don’t know how uncomfortable it is.”
She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it.
“I can’t help it,” he said slowly, “I’m made like that. I can’t be comfortable.”
Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open.
“I know you can’t,” she said, “but I can, and you mustn’t spoil it for me.”
He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried:
“Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would——”