She spoke as if she spoke to my soul, very quietly and very earnestly,
seeking to give the truth. “Something cottony in that cloth of yours,”
she said. “I know there’s something horrible in being swung round by
things like that, but they did swing me round. In the old time—to have
confessed that! And I hated Clayton—and the grime of it. That kitchen!
Your mother’s dreadful kitchen! And besides, Willie, I was afraid of
you. I didn’t understand you and I did him. It’s different now—but then
I knew what he meant. And there was his voice.”
“Yes,” I said to Verrall, making these discoveries quietly, “yes,
Verrall, you have a good voice. Queer I never thought of that before!”
We sat silently for a time before our vivisected passions.
“Gods!” I cried, “and there was our poor little top-hamper of
intelligence on all these waves of instinct and wordless desire, these
foaming things of touch and sight and feeling, like—like a coop of hens
washed overboard and clucking amidst the seas.”
Verrall laughed approval of the image I had struck out. “A week ago,”
he said, trying it further, “we were clinging to our chicken coops and
going with the heave and pour. That was true enough a week ago. But
to-day———?”
“To-day,” I said, “the wind has fallen. The world storm is over. And
each chicken coop has changed by a miracle to a vessel that makes head
against the sea.”
§ 4
“What are we to do?” asked Verrall.
Nettie drew a deep crimson carnation from the bowl before us, and began
very neatly and deliberately to turn down the sepals of its calyx and
remove, one by one, its petals. I remember that went on through all our
talk. She put those ragged crimson shreds in a long row and adjusted
them and readjusted them. When at last I was alone with these vestiges
the pattern was still incomplete.
“Well,” said I, “the matter seems fairly simple. You two”—I swallowed
it—“love one another.”