"Do you think so?" she said. "Then I will come, for I do not like to be lost. What should you do if we were lost? Build me a hut to take shelter in? or take off your coat to keep me warm and then go and look for the nearest village? That is what happens in some of the Contessa's old books—but, ah, not in the Tauchnitz now. But it would be nonsense, of course, for there are the red chimneys of the Hall staring us in the face, so how could we be lost?"
"When it is dark," said Jock, "you can't see the red always; and then you go rambling and wandering about, and hit yourself against the trees, and get up to the ankles in the wet grass and—don't like it at all." He laughed himself a little, with a laugh that was somewhat like a growl at his own abrupt conclusion, to which Bice responded cordially.
"How nice it is to laugh," she said, "it gets the air into your lungs and then you can breathe. It is to breathe I want—large—a whole world full," she cried, throwing out her arms and opening her mouth. "Because you know the rooms are small here, and there is so much furniture, the windows closed with curtains, the floors all hot with carpets. Do they shut you up as if in a box at night, with the shutters shut and all so dark? They do me. But as soon as they are gone I open. I like far better our rooms with big walls, and marble that is cool, and large, large windows that you can lie and look out at, when you wake, all painted upon the sky."
"I should think," said Jock, with the impulse of contradiction, "they would not be at all comfortable——"
"Comfortable," she cried in high disdain, "does one want to be comfortable? One wants to live, and feel the air, and everything that is round."
"That's what we do at school," said Jock, waking up to a sense of the affinities as he had already done to the diversities between them.
"Tell me about school," she cried, with a pretty imperious air; and Jock, who never desired any better, obeyed.