"I think," she said in a low, incisive, but unsteady voice, "that I do not quite follow."
He looked at her in a very simple, earnest way. "You don't?" he asked. There was a pause and then he said, "I saw you at the theatre last night."
"Indeed?" she murmured with a faint note of irony.
But she did not deflect him from that simple earnestness. "And when I went home I thought about you." He paused and then added, gently, "Most all night, I thought about you."
And still she only sat there looking at him and as if holding herself very tight. She had tried to smile at that last and the little disdainful smile had stiffened on her lips, making them look pulled out of shape and set that way.
"I said to myself," Ted went on, "'What's she getting out of it?'" His voice came up on that; he said it rather roughly.
Her face flamed. "If this is what you have come here to say—" she began in a low angry voice. "If this is what you have intruded into my house for—you—!" She made a movement as if about to rise.
Ted threw out his hand with a little gesture of wanting to explain. "Maybe I shouldn't have put it that way. I hope I didn't seem rude. I only meant," he said gently, "that as I watched you you didn't look as though you were happy."
"And what if I'm not?" she cried, as if stung by that. "What if I'm not? Does that give you any right to come here and tell me so?"
He shook his head, as if troubled at again putting things badly. "I really came," he said, in a low earnest voice, "because it seemed to me it must be that you did not understand. It occurred to me that perhaps no one had ever tried to make you understand. I came because it seemed fairer—to everybody."