To fill up the time she toys with a novel or touches
softly the keys of the piano until he is quite comfortable and ready
to begin. He glides into his subject with the studied calm of one
with all the afternoon before him. She listens to him in rapt
attention. She does not dream of interrupting him; would scorn the
suggestion of chipping in with any little notion of her own likely to
disarrange his train of thought. All she does when he pauses, as
occasionally he has to for the purpose of taking breath, is to come
to his assistance with short encouraging remarks, such, for instance,
as: "Well." "You think that." "And if I did?" Her object seems to
be to help him on. "Go on," she says from time to time, bitterly.
And he goes on. Towards the end, when he shows signs of easing up,
she puts it to him as one sportsman to another: Is he quite
finished? Is that all? Sometimes it isn't. As often as not he has
been saving the pick of the basket for the last.
"No," he says, "that is not all. There is something else!"
That is quite enough for her. That is all she wanted to know. She
merely asked in case there might be. As it appears there is, she re-
settles herself in her chair and is again all ears.
When it does come--when he is quite sure there is nothing he has
forgotten, no little point that he has overlooked, she rises.
"I have listened patiently," she begins, "to all that you have said.
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