She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.
"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.
Cyprian laughed. Then he protested, in his amusement, at the simplicity of Ferlie grown-up. Presently, he sobered and began to attempt explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately deaf ear.
"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.
"Where to?"
Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in very sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate her; if she would lend herself to extrication. He was honestly puzzled.
Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not another couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable. Ferlie and he. A law unto themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream because her surroundings were dark and lonely. A law unto themselves when he received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of men in general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of that farcical avuncular status. A law unto themselves in their unnaturally unusual correspondence with its sprawled confidences on one side and its restrained admissions on the other of his need of her in the background of his life.
That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it now that she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship and—and normalize it.
"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even now, an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside the walls of which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always intended to remain?"
This was utter nonsense. Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen, was not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at eighteen, was, most distinctly, to be brought up short.