It is astonishing what confidence such an attitude will give. Confidences—hesitating confidences, at all events—will take flight before the least trace of urgency. If you think you’ve got to be in a hurry to show them, they hide like shy children in the inmost recesses of your soul, and no amount of coaxing will bring them forth to the light of day. You may, by dint of violent effort, force them forth, so to speak; but, coming unwillingly, they show no trace of their true personality. You barely recognize them yourself; a stranger will not recognize them at all, unless he be the one in a million endowed with an almost uncanny gift of insight. And such a one, to my thinking, will never hurry confidences.
“Do you mind my smoking?” asked David.
“Not a bit,” returned Elizabeth cheerily.
David pulled pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket. Busy with them, he spoke.
“I am a bad hand at talking,” said he. “Words are slippery kind of things, and slide out of my mind as soon as I think I’ve got them fixed there; so, if I talk in a muddle, perhaps you’ll forgive me. I can’t even get what I want to say very clearly to myself.”
He paused to light his pipe. Then went on:
“I fancy I’ll have to talk a bit in kind of symbols. I see things that way myself better than in actual descriptive words. You know, of course, my reason for being here?”
“I do,” responded Elizabeth.
David was silent for a moment.
“Well,” he said presently, pulling at his pipe, “when I set out on this job, I didn’t think much about the right or wrong of it. It was simply there. It got up and stood before me suddenly, and I said to myself, That’s what I’m going for. I went for it. There’s no need to go into details. It wasn’t an easy undertaking, but I brought it through. What I set out to get is mine. It’s there. I’ve only got to put out my hand and take it.”