David sat there.
This Cornelia understood. Tom was on one of his moody jaunts and away. She had sat there watching as a girl on a fence might watch a horseman gallop past in dust and hoof-thud. She recoiled as he swung in too near.
Tom laughed. “Come! You need some more coffee,” to David. “You are half asleep. I can’t get along without coffee. Can you? The world is so much a dream, one’s sense of fitness makes one go to sleep beholding it. I find I can do endless work, with endless cups of coffee. I wonder who invented coffee. A shame, isn’t it, that the true benefactors of the human race are nameless. The Gods tied Prometheus to a rock and set a vulture on him, for giving us fire. The other saviors of life they have made nameless.”
He skipped nimbly from parable to fun: from apostrophe to laughter. David found himself loving the mere exercise of following his new friend. It was like a cross-country run with an agile pathman. Over brook and rock he tried to leap with him. No time to look and to consider. The way was nothing, the leaping everything.
The story was forgotten. It was shivered away in the pelt of Tom’s succeeding words.
Cornelia was silent. She was pensive. She had stopped listening to Tom. When he went galloping like this, he was running away from something deep in himself. She knew. He would take this thing within him he needed to escape and toss it far and rush after it. Let him rush.
There was David laughing. Tom no longer needed to smoke cigarettes. David was glowing near his finger-tips.
Coffee was gone. Night had come up from the street like incense of incantation. It curled its way into the room, it subdued the flame of the room to a warm ash.
Tom lighted a lamp. No one spoke. A golden ray filtered about the table. It left them in shadows. David got up to leave.
“I was so happy to be here,” he said.