"Leslie, you know we talked it all over yesterday." "I know, I know." "And you said it was all right. You said you understood. There wasn't going to be any kind of misunderstanding...." "There isn't any misunderstanding. Why do you jump on me? I didn't begin talking about it." This was manifestly true. However, she handled it deftly. "You don't have to talk when you look that way." "Sorry!" snapped Leslie, who began moodily tapping with his fingers on the oilcloth. Without realizing it, he was tapping the same tune he had just been humming. She flushed a little, and felt a brief angriness toward him. Had she given words to what was, for a moment, really in her mind, she would have maintained, and not without honest warmth, that a man you have jilted hasn't any right to feel hurt. But a moment later this conception did not seem quite so honest. No, it didn't honour her. She knew it didn't. And ere she had drawn three breaths she was thinking of Leslie with considerably more tenderness. However, in this connection, as with the momentary impatience, sentiment did not spend itself in words. She merely asked him, in a very kindly way, how he liked his eggs best. [Pg 32] [Pg 32] "I don't care," he replied, employing the colourless masculine non-assertiveness usual in such cases. "Do you like them scrambled?" He nodded drearily. "Then we'll have them scrambled," she announced with a cheerful smile, breaking several eggs across the edge of a bowl, adding a little milk, as carefully measured off as though it were vanilla for a cake, and proceeding slightly to beat the combination. There seemed something ungraspably and very subtly characteristic in the decision to scramble them.... In no time the two were seated at breakfast. She grew chatty. "I'm sorry there isn't any toast, Les. We can't make decent toast over an oil fire. We've tried it," she expanded
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