That seemed reasonable. What was so
queer was how he treated me like a kid. Rather an intelligent kid, you
know. He said: 'Did you, at school, Louis, have the lamp and orange and
hatpin trick to explain night and day to you?' I said yes, and it all
came back to me, being a kid in school and under orders, you know. And
he said: 'Suppose your master had jabbed the hatpin just anywhere,
nowhere near the centre--how the orange would have wobbled, wouldn't
it?' I said it would, and he went on to say the hatpin wasn't jabbed
through my centre, and that's why _I_ wobbled so much. That was very
reasonable, too--but I told him I didn't see how the hatpin was going to
be pulled out. Yet all the time I listened to him, sort of fascinated by
a charm he has--seems a ridiculous thing to say about a man, doesn't
it?"
"No--not a bit," she said faintly.
"He seemed to care a lot about me. No one but you ever had. And then he
asked me if I realized what a thin time you had of it. 'Does it ever
occur to you, Louis, that your wife has had a superhuman job? And she's
only a girl after all. You know what women are,' he said. They pretend
to us that they're so very strong and independent. Like a child trying
to lift a great weight, and saying: 'No, no--you shan't help. I can do
it,' and in the same minute dropping it on his toes with a smash and
coming to be comforted! Marcella's like that.
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