None with so glassy a surface as Eva when she refused to be halted on a line of thought. “He has a way of saying things harshly. I can’t bear harshness. When things happen that hurt your heart, your brain doesn’t work. I had had a bad night--hopeless agony of mind because I couldn’t recapture a dream. And I said to him ‘You can’t understand!’ If he had said something! But how was I to know how he took it, when he didn’t say a word?” I began explaining as if she were a child. “He wanted to say ‘Will you kindly, mercifully, put it into words--say, out loud, what you think of my work, of my potential ability to do great work?’” She burst out laughing. “Dinah, darling: Nick isn’t at all like that. He’s a Dutchman. He’s solid and calm to the point of being nearly phlegmatic; he’s---- No, he isn’t stodgy, bless him! He’s a dear.” “He might merely be reticent,” I suggested. I knew nothing about him. But I judged him by other reserved men. This desire of his, to know the worst, was something that was now, and would always be, a thing that in decency he would keep from her. The reticences of life were one thing; they were established by form; but, beyond and entombed, were the reticences of the heart, and of the spirit, and of these a man found it impossible to speak. I said: “You must often have rubbed it in on him that you don’t think much of his ability.” Her knit brow revealed her difficulty over this. “I don’t see why you say such a thing. Look here: I’m going to tell you all we said, that morning. Then you can see for yourself. I tried to let him down easily. I said ‘I knew, last night, that something had gone wrong with you’.” I sat watching her face. It was difficult to believe that she had carried on her part of the conversation as she now reported it to me. She had, however, so phenomenal a memory for conversations that it was impossible to doubt the essential truth of her complete misunderstanding. “He didn’t meet me half-way,” she complained. “He was rather mean. ‘Let us not bring it down to a struggle between us,’ he said to me. I said: ‘You know that I believe in you, don’t you?’ He came at me with one of those hateful counter questions: ‘Do you?’ So I looked straight at him and asked ‘You’ve never believed in me, have you?’ He said--as if this were quite sufficient: ‘I’ve loved you.’” “Why wasn’t it sufficient?” I put it to her. A man loves a woman, I explained; this emotion does not presuppose belief in anything about her, beyond her fidelity. His belief in Eva was founded on the evidence of his eyes. A man would argue that behind a face so sweet there must lie womanliness. She bit her lip. She was losing patience with me. “You don’t try to understand,” she complained. “You’re wrong. I understand only too well.” I, on my part, was losing patience. Usually, I lost patience with Eva towards the end of a long talk. “You don’t want love; you want adoration--little Bodhisattvas sitting at your feet.”