TWO:He was feeling so comfortable now that he scarcely wished for Mrs Keelings entry. Alices earnest eyes, so he told himself (thereby revealing his ignorance of psychology) were dim with the perception of this fine interrogation. He was being wonderful, as he had so often been before, and the perception of that would surely fill her soul with the altruistic glee that possessed himself. He began, in the sense of personal security which this gave him, to get a little incautious. He did not wait for her acceptance of the prodigious doctrine that nothing you get matters to the problematical getter, but construed his own sense of security into her acquiescence."If I go to sleep," I said,--"you know how I dream. I shall have one of those dreams of mine to carry around in my memory for a year, like a bullet in my back." So there the dear fellow had sat all night to give me my hourly powders of reassurance that I could be a quartermaster's clerk without shame.
TWO:Im a Pagan to-day, she said, and so it appears are you. Pan is sitting somewhere in this wood. Did you hear his flute?WHALE BREACHING. WHALE "BREACHING."
TWO:"A little way off from this ploughman there was a man threshing grain on some slats; they looked like a small ladder placed on an incline, and the way he did the work was to take a handful of grain and thresh it against the slats till he had knocked out all the kernels and left nothing but the straw. Such a thing as a threshing-machine would astonish them very much, I should think, and I don't believe they would allow it to run.[Pg 333] Labor is so cheap in China that they don't want any machinery to save it; when you can hire a man for five cents a day, and even less, you haven't any occasion to economize.
TWO:Oh, you just wait till he does, and that wont be a very long wait, she said. You think youll be shy and nervous, but you wont when your turn comes. Ill be bound you like him well enough really.