Together in the cool living-room, after breakfast, they settled for a happy, busy morning—the business of exchanging thoughts, including vast material for discussion accumulated over night.
After a year’s absence, and in the sudden sun-burst of their reunion, Eris was venturing more and more in the art of conversation. With Annan, diffidence, shyness were vanishing in their new and happy intimacy. She was learning to withhold from him nothing that concerned the things of the mind. Its pleasures she hastened to surrender to him; its perplexities she offered him with a wistful candour that constantly was stirring depths within him hitherto obscurely stagnant.
All these—her personality, the physical loveliness of the girl—were subtly obsessing him, usurping intellectual routine when he was away, crowding other thoughts, colouring his mental process, interfering with its clarity when he worked—interrupting charmingly—as though her light touch on his sleeve had arrested his pen.
She was asking him now about the progress of his new novel: he was lighting a cigarette, and he looked up over the burning match:
“It’s an inert lump,” he said. “I come in and give it a kick but it doesn’t even squirm.”
“Why?” she asked, concerned.
He lighted his cigarette. There was a mischievous glimmer in his eyes:
“Probably it’s sulking because I’m having a better time with you.”
“You’re not serious!”