"Shall I tell you," he asked, "exactly why I insisted on rowing you in? I'm afraid"—he glanced at her with the quick smile breaking again on his lips—"I'm afraid you don't care whether I tell you or not. Do you?"
"If you ask me—I really don't," she said. "And, by the way, do you know that if you turned around properly and faced the stern you could make better progress with your oars?"
"By 'better' do you mean quicker progress?" he asked, so naïvely that she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were usually stupid.
"Yes, of course," she said, impatient. "It's all very well to push a punt across a mill-pond that way, but it's not treating the Atlantic with very much respect."
"You were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when you started to swim across it."
But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her unsmiling silence.
He thought to himself: "Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of it!—with her eyes of a thinking goddess!—and no ideas behind them! What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the obvious."
And, aloud, fatuously: "This is a rarely beautiful scene—"
"What?" crisply.
And feeling mildly wicked he continued: