But she only stood there in front of him, near the window.
“Never mind!” she said. “Only you remember that Madre tried. She had never said much about it to me. But now and then from just a word I know that she feels bad, that she wishes very much she could do something. Only the other day she said to me, ‘We have the instinct, men the vocabulary.’ She was meaning that you had. She even told me to ask you something that I had asked her, and she said, ‘I feel all the things that he can explain.’ And there was something in her voice that hurt me—for her. And Madre is so clever. Isn’t she clever?”
“Yes.”
“And if Madre can’t do things, you can imagine that I feel rather absurd now that I’m telling you.”
“Yes, being just as you are, Vere, I can quite imagine that you do. But we can have sweet feelings of absurdity that only arise from something moral within us, a moral delicacy. However, would you like me to look at what you have been writing about the sea?”
“Yes, if you can do it quite seriously.”
“I could not do it in any other way.”
“Then—thank you.”
She went out of the room, not without a sort of simple dignity that was utterly removed from conceit or pretentiousness.
What a strange end, this, to their laughter!