‘How funny! If I could draw I’d draw all day. I’d be so excited at being able to, I’d go on and on. I’d be so horrid and enthusiastic. I wouldn’t have any sense of humour about it. You’d think me nauseating, wouldn’t you?’
He nodded, smiling.
‘But I’d draw. I’d be the best drawer in the world. Oh, you are lucky! I do envy people with a specialty, and I do love them. Isn’t it funny how fingers take naturally to one form of activity and not to another? Mine—mine—’ she spread them out and looked at them—‘mine wouldn’t draw if I spent all my life trying to make them; but—they know how to touch a piano—only a little of course; but they understand that without having it explained. And some fingers can make lovely things with a needle and thread and a bit of stuff. There’s another mystery! Then there are the machine makers, and the ones that can use knives like artists to take away bits of people or put bits in,—and the ones that can remove pain just by touching.... Some people are their hands, aren’t they? They understand with them. But most people have idiot hands,—destroyers. Roddy, why are some of our senses always idiots? All my senses are semi-imbecile, and I’m better off than lots of people, I suppose. Seems to me, what they call the norm is practically idiot, and any departure is just a little more or less so. Yet one has this idea of perfection——’
She stopped abruptly. He was not interested, and his face in the wan light was a blank which might be hiding mockery or distrust of a girl who affected vaporous philosophizings, trying, no doubt, to appear clever. She flushed. Such stuff had been her food for years, chewed over secretly, or confided to the one friend, the Roddy of her imagination; and here she was in the foolishness of her elation pouring it out to this unmoved young man who thought—she must remember this—that he was meeting her for the first time. It was plain, it must be plain to him, that she was a person with no notion of the rules of behaviour.
‘Come back and dance,’ suggested Roddy at last.
It was curious how much easier it was to get on with Roddy if he had an arm round you. His mind, the whole of him, came freely to meet you then; there was entire happiness, entire peace and harmony. It was far more difficult to find him on the plane where only minds, not senses, had contact,—the plane on which a Julian, one whose physical touch could never be desirable, was reached without any groping. Roddy put something in the way. He guarded himself almost as if he suspected you of trying to catch him out; or of taking an impertinent interest in him. His mind would be thrilling if you could dig it out: all hidden and withheld things were.
‘I don’t want ever to stop,’ she said suddenly.
‘We won’t,’ he promised and held her closer, as if he were as much caught away and dazed as she.
He bent his head and whispered laughingly:
‘Just say it.’