“Thank you, Elice. You’re right, as usual. I said I was raw to-day. It’s boyish to be so too, I realize that. But it’s hard sometimes, deucedly hard, when others are doing something and getting somewhere to see yourself standing still. One gets to thinking and imagining things that probably don’t exist.” He took a long breath. “It’s this thing of imagination that’s worse than reality. It crawls in between everything so; and somehow you can’t keep it out. It gives one a scare.” He laughed shortly, ill at ease. “It even makes one doubt a little the people one believes in most: take you and me, for instance. In my sane moments I know nothing could get between us; but sometimes I get to imagining—times like the last few days when I am—raw—that we’re gradually drifting apart. A little difference of opinion comes up and imagination magnifies until it becomes a mountain and—I know I’m preposterous, Elice, and there’s nothing really to it, but the thing’s been on my mind and I wanted to tell you and get it out of my system.” He had 84 hurried on, leading up to the point, making the situation deliberately. Now he turned to her, smiling frankly. “It’s preposterous, isn’t it, Elice? Tell me so. I like to hear you say it.”
“Preposterous, Steve?” The girl returned the look, but for some reason, probably one she herself could not have told, she did not smile. She merely looked at him, steadily, unwaveringly. “I have never thought of the possibility before, never questioned. Certainly nothing has come between us. To imagine—I never imagine the unpleasant, Steve.”
The figure in the hammock shifted restlessly, as though but half satisfied.
“And nothing ever will, Elice?” he pressed. “Say that just to please me. I think an awful lot of you, girl; so much that at times I’m afraid.”
This time the girl smiled, quietly, very quietly.
“And I of you, Steve,” she echoed. “Must I protest that?”
“No,” swiftly, “not for an instant. I don’t doubt, mind.... It’s all that cursed imagination of mine. I was only thinking of the future. If things shouldn’t come my way, shouldn’t—I put it at the worst possible—if by any chance I should remain a—failure such as I am now—you 85 wouldn’t mind—would overlook—it wouldn’t make any difference at all with you and me, would it, Elice?”
“Steve, you mustn’t say such things—mustn’t, I say. It’s morbid. I won’t listen.”
“But tell me,” passionately, “what I asked. I want to hear you say it. I want to know.”
For an instant the girl was silent, an instant that seemed minutes to the expectant listener. For the second time she met him eye to eye.