“He’s a very good fellow,” I said.
“Heredity, you see,” she suddenly explained. “Father almost died of it. Brandy, though. He liked brandy, Barty did. They said he would die if he had more than half-a-bottle a day, but he had a bottle to make sure, and then he died of pneumonia.”
Then, in her silence, she was so still that I grew very uncomfortable. What was she thinking about? She was staring down at the sprawling thing that was her twin brother, the emerald still livid against his arm.
“He wrote a very good book once,” I said, to say something.
“Yes. About Boy....”
“Boy?” Gerald, you see, was no talker. He just swore, but automatically; it meant nothing.
“Didn’t you know?” She looked at me again, but her eyes seemed to me masked. I was to know later why her eyes were masked just then. I said I knew nothing at all about Gerald.
She passed a finger over one of her eyebrows, and looked at it. “Dirty,” she said.
“Years ago,” she said, “before the war, Gerald{25} had a very great friend. Gerald, you see, is a hero-worshipper. In spite of his air and everything, that is what Gerald is, a hero-worshipper. And no hero, no Gerald. And so, when his hero died, Gerald died too. Funny, life is, isn’t it? Then the war, and that, of course, buried him. And now....” Those absorbed, blazing blue eyes! The sea was in them, and the whisper of all open places: the magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.
{25}
“No friends?” she asked dimly. “No women? Nothing?”
And just at that moment I had, for the first time, that feeling of incapacity with her. I was to have it again, profoundly, but I remember vividly that it came for the first time just then, in poor, furious Gerald’s room. Dingy—that is what I felt before this quiet, thoughtful woman with the absorbed eyes. Dingy. I felt, I suppose, the immense dinginess of being a human being, for there is an immense, unalterable dinginess in being human, in the limitation of being human. But why I should feel that particularly with her I did not know then. She, too, was human, quiet, gentle, very unaware. But, later, I was to know why.
It was with an effort that I told her about Gerald. That feeling of self-dinginess came somehow to a point in just feeling common. For I was what Gerald
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