“But this is an unusually open winter; it’s perfectly delightful outdoors to-day. And the sky would be blue if you could see it.”
She raised her eyes to the window to verify his statement.
“I suppose,” he said, without changing the key of their dialogue, “that we could keep this up for several days if it seemed necessary.”
“I think so myself!” she affirmed; “it would be interesting to see how long one could go on being perfectly stupid. It’s a great resource, talking stupid talk.”
“The only trouble is that it’s such a waste of time. There are so many interesting things to say!”
“Do you mean that you would say them? How very odd!”
She threaded a needle, with the pretty solicitude, the graceful, bird-like intentness with which a woman performs this slightest office, and he was aware of his joy in the nimbleness of her fingers, and their steadiness as they answered the quick searching of her eyes with the point of thread.
“Would you rather not refer to it at all?” he asked.
“Oh, my not going? Why should anything be said about a matter that has already been fully explained? You are a man; you have been on a journey; you have been down in the city all morning; have you nothing to say to an unfortunate slave, who has been shut up here with her needle three long days?”
“The slavery of the needle is too satisfying a spectacle in itself to admit of any coarser topic. I should judge”—and he bent nearer—“I should judge, if my dull masculine eye is competent to pass on such a thing, that your industry has been of rather recent date. You hadn’t been at work on that thing all morning.”