“Please, Iris, be still and good! That man said he would fire me out for two pins.” So grey she looked, frail beyond frailty, in the gay afternoon light. It was the fifteenth afternoon of February, as I remember well.
Never moving her head, only her eyes vivid with restless insurgent life, she whispered defiantly: “As long as I lie quiet like this no one can do anything to me or ... fire you out or anything. You just ... stay where you are. Be brave, child....”
Now there were queer, funny things in the great eyes of the still head. They were childish, too, and I laughed at them, but she would not laugh, because it hurt her.
We sat in silence, not to tire her. She lay flat on her back, her head on a pillow which was so low as to be only a pillow by courtesy. Her eyes would be fixed on the ceiling, and then she would look sideways at me, and that was when I seemed to see queer, funny things in her eyes. They were as though glistening with bits of things ... fear, pride, a sort of childish glee, a sort of childish naughtiness, a sort of childish shamefacedness. It was as though she was terrified of her new toy, and very proud of it, too—her returning life. And then the shamefacedness, an almost guilty look, as though she had just cheated some one out of something in a funny way. Not that she hadn’t been very clever either, her look seemed to say. And somehow I was made a fellow-conspirator in all this ... in the terror, pride, glee, mischief, shamefacedness with which she was deliciously playing with her new toy, returning life.
She said suddenly, in an enormous voice which she had obviously been husbanding for the purpose: “No one wants me....” And I think, but I am not sure, that she would have giggled if she could.
“Iris, you’ll have Masters in here if you go shouting like that.”
“He didn’t want me, even....”
“Who didn’t? Masters didn’t?”
“No. God.”
“Oh, I see,” I said.