“I walked three miles on a winter day,” she said, “to hear you talk. That was my great idea for to-day, Ivor. I myself have not been doing very much talking of late—and, you know, I’m very tired of being with people whose main purpose in conversation is to massacre syntax and evade sense.”
“But it’s not quite fair to come to talk to a man who has been alone for weeks! Maybe you will be washed away in the raw stuff—and there will be headlines in the papers: Disappearance of famous beauty—thought to have been washed away in the froth of a hermit’s sudden speech.’ ...”
But she was silent, provoking him. She was yielding up her interest in him to him, to do as he liked with—on a January afternoon! And in the nervous stress of that moment he jumped up from his chair and stood by the fire, and bent to it to light a spill for his cigarette; and he stared into it, his face sideways to her.
Virginia watched him curiously.
“You told me yesterday that you were working, Ivor. Now I would like to hear about that—may I? Are you writing a new novel?”
He stood above her on the hearth, she sprawled lazily in the chair beneath him.
“I’m not writing anything, Virginia—I’m trying to learn how to play a game. It’s called a ‘game’ anyway—that one which it used to be the fashion for you and me and all cleverish young people to despise—the game of trying to understand the country we live in so that we might help in the working of it. It sounds a pompous business, and so we despised it.”
“Oh!” And Virginia made a little face, as though a little puzzled and a little bored. “Do you seriously mean to tell me that you are going to stand on that hearth and talk politics to me? Oh, Ivor, must you do that!” She put such pathos into her words that they laughed together.
“Yes, Ivor?” she asked gently.
“But I’m very serious about it, Virginia, so it’s no good your saying, “Yes, Ivor” at me as though I needed humouring. I’ve got a frightfully English feeling about me these days,” he explained, “and I can’t bear to think of the way we’ve all slacked—all we young and youngish people. Just utterly slacked!”