“Well, Mary—?”
As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado, to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed. But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with her fingers and soothed him and said:
“There, there. Don’t cry! Tell me why you’re crying—“; and they would clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother’s. He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other people in the room.
“How damnable this all is!” he exclaimed abruptly.
“What are you talking about?” she replied, rather vaguely, still looking out of the window.
He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.
“Mary,” he said, “I want to talk to you. Haven’t we nearly done? Why don’t they take away these plates?”
Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.
“They’ll come all in good time,” she said; and felt it necessary to display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a little heap of bread-crumbs.
“I want to apologize,” Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from passing.