‘Friends?’ she retorted, ‘you are too anxious to be friends with yourself, to be a safe friend for anyone else, I’m thinking. The best friend for you is some one who knows how to make you honest to ’em from a distance.’
She gave him his medicine as she spoke, and saw him drink it.
‘Well, there’s one thing you’re honest about at any rate,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he inquired, hopefully.
‘You bite your nails, and you don’t try to hide it.’
‘What does that matter to anybody?’ he demanded irritably.
‘Nothing, except to yourself. I never knew anybody yet that bit his nails who was able to tell the truth. Not that that matters to you, I suppose you’ll say.’
‘I do tell the truth sometimes,’ he declared in a tone of appealing naïveté. ‘And when I do, you don’t believe me.’
‘When you do,’ she said, ‘you show a red light. That frightens me. It’s like a train whistling and screaming to say there’s going to be an accident.’
Whereat Mr. Trimblerigg put himself resolutely under the bed-clothes: and so she left him.