He was silent a moment. Then, determined not to be outdone, he said: "When I'm with you I begin to feel like a star myself." "As though you weren't always one." "No. It's only you. Till I found you I was just an angry ball of mud." "But--" "A thirsty man in a stuffy room." "But--" "An emptiness, a wailing blank, an eviscerated thing." "A what?" asked Ingeborg, who had not heard that word before. "And you," he went on, "are the cool water that quenches me, the scent of roses come into the room, liquid light to my clay." She drew a deep breath. "It's wonderful, wonderful," she said. "And it sounds so real somehow--really almost as though you meant it. Oh, I don't mind you making fun of me a bit if only you'll go on saying lovely things like that." "Fun of you? Have you no idea, then, positively no idea, how sweet you are?" He bent down and looked into her face. "With little kisses in each of your eyes," he said, scrutinizing them. CHAPTER XXIX In Redchester nobody talked of kisses. They were things not mentioned. They were things allowable only under strictly defined conditions--if you did not want to kiss, for instance, and the other person did not like it--and confined in their application to the related. Like pews in a parish church, they were reserved for families. Aunts might kiss: freely. Especially if they were bearded--Ingeborg had an aunt with a beard. Mothers might kiss; she had seen her calm mother kiss a new-born baby with a sort of devouring, a cannibalism. Bishops might kiss, within a certain restricted area. As for husbands, they did kiss, and nothing stopped them till the day when they suddenly didn't. But no one, aunts, mothers, bishops, or husbands, regarded the practice as a suitable basis for conversation. How refreshing, therefore, and how altogether delightful it was that Ingram should be so natural, and how she loved to know that, though of course he was pretending about the little kisses in her eyes, he thought it worth while to pretend! With glee and pride and amusement she wondered what Redchester would say if it could hear the great man it, too, honoured being so simple and at the same time so very kind. For the first time she did not answer back; she was silent, thinking amused and pleasant thoughts. And Ingram walking beside her with his hands in his pockets and a gayness about his heels felt triumphant, for he had, he thought, got through to her self-consciousness, he had got her quiet at last.