"Certainly. With pleasure."
She was all helpless again and childlike, and he liked her that way best.
"I don't like the streets," she explained. "I'm afraid of them. I mean I'm afraid of the people in them. They stare at me something awful. So horribly rude, isn't it, to stare?"
"Rude?" said Ransome. "It's disgustin'."
"As if there was something peculiar about me. Do you see anything peculiar about me? Anything, I mean, to make them stare?"
He was silent.
"Do you?" she insisted, poignantly.
They were advancing headlong toward intimacy and its embarrassments.
"Well, no," he said, "if you ask me—no, I don't. Except that, don't you know, you're—"