THE BIRTHPLACE
"What's the use of what?" her husband asked. "The use, you mean, of our coming here? Why, the place is charming in itself. And it's also interesting," he added to Gedge, "to know how you get on."
Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but he answered the young woman first. If poor Isabel, he was thinking, could only have been like that!—not as to youth, beauty, arrangement of hair or picturesque grace of hat—these things he didn't mind; but as to sympathy, facility, light perceptive, and yet not cheap, detachment! "I don't say it wasn't—but I don't say it was."
"Ah, but doesn't that," she returned, "come very much to the same thing? And don't They want also to see where He had His dinner and where He had His tea?"
"They want everything," said Morris Gedge. "They want to see where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and where His mother boiled her pot."
"But if you don't show them———?"
"They show me. It's in all their little books."
"You mean," the husband asked, "that you've only to hold your tongue?"
"I try to," said Gedge.
"Well," his visitor smiled, "I see you can."
Gedge hesitated. "I can't."
"Oh, well," said his friend, "what does it matter?"
"I do speak," he continued. "I can't sometimes not."
"Then how do you get on?"
Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense, than he had ever looked at anyone—even at Isabel when she frightened him. "I don't get on. I speak," he said, "since I've spoken to you."
"Oh, we sha'n't hurt you!" the young man reassuringly laughed.
The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened; the
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