“You need not look like that,” he said irritably; “you look as if you had never thought of it.”
“I have not—for a long time; perhaps I did once—before I became old and wise. I am surprised, I can not understand it; I was so sure that you could never care for me.”
“Why should I not? It is the most natural thing in the world.”
“I do not think so; I can not understand.”
“Accept it upon my testimony, do not try to understand it.”
He betrayed no feeling, except in his quickened tone; she was too bewildered to be conscious of any feeling at all; she listened to the sound of her own voice, as if another were speaking; she remembered afterward, that for once in her life she had heard the sound of her own voice. She was thinking, “My voice is pleasant, only so cold and even.”
“Will you not answer me?”
She was thinking; she had forgotten to answer.
“Why should you like me?” she said at last.
“There’s reason enough, allow me to judge; but you do not come to the point.”