Suddenly she was serious. She had glanced dazzlingly around me. Now it was as if she came straight forward.
“I’ll dare be ‘serious’ with you,” she murmured.
She looked full at me: her eyes had a crisp tenderness, like some immortal fruit ever upon the Springlike verge of ripeness. I knew that she understood, although the words perhaps were not within her mind, how laughter is oblique: how seriousness is the full face of joy.
We sat in a little bower cut off from the hall by palms. It became a cool and fluid haven from the hall—from the hall’s synthetic sun. She was quiet. She folded her frail hands in her lap and raised her head. A smile flickered at her mouth like a butterfly at a fruit. She dispelled it.
“It’s hard to sit serious,” she whispered.
“It is so revealing.”
Again, instantly, she understood.
“Yes: we don’t mind being naked when we are in motion. It must be that motion covers us? The dance, the swim. But being still, and being seen....”
“Laughter,” I said, “is a shift we wear like motion.”
There was a pause. I illogically broke it: “You are uncovered, yet you are at ease.”