“Perhaps I have never yet been sheerly happy.”
“What would make you?”
“I haven’t found out.”
“But I want to know. If you smiled for me you would seem less remote.”
“Am I remote?”
“Yes—remote is the word.” He looked at her fixedly, then shook himself and began to pace up and down the room. When next he spoke his voice was querulous and irritable:
“I should have been working all this while. The train of my thoughts is all upset—disordered. It is unlike you to disturb me. I’ve lost an hour. Tomorrow I must work all day—alone.”
“Go back to yourself,” she said, gently.
She did not leave at once, but half an hour later he looked up and saw she was buttoning her coat.
“You needn’t go.”