"A--a--ah! If we could stay like this forever and ever, in this quiet, lovely place filled with nothing but us two! If we could stay!" He thought of Kurt, and his mania for moving on. She said: "René! What do you like best in the world? I should like to give it you." He answered: "Peace." "Peace? Isn't this peace?" Anger stirred in him on that. How could she talk of peace when to him every moment throbbed with menace? He turned over on his side away from her. "Can there ever be peace," he asked, "between a man and a woman?" "What do you mean?" He made no reply. "Ren! What do you mean? You sounded almost angry. Oh, I know what you mean." And she dodged aside into phrases--the war of the sexes, the difficulty of adjustment between the masculine-feminine and the feminine-masculine. He was thinking of himself and her, she of abstract entities between whom there was an hypothetical bottomless difference. She guessed that he might be bored with love-making and the honey-dew of desire, and set herself to be interesting to keep him amused. She succeeded, but not without exasperating him a little. "I meant you and me," he said, biting out his words. "Us? Oh, you dear silly! There never was anything so wonderful as us. We couldn't be more wonderful. Could we?" "I dunno. But as I sit here, Lin, I can't help thinking of those damned Smallmans. They must have sat here and they must have said: 'How wonderful we are!'" That seemed to strike home to her, to hurt her, for she cried out and jumped to her feet. "Oh, I never thought----" She moved quickly away and stood on top of a little hill against the sky, the wind driving back her skirts and sending them ballooning out behind her. He came up to her. "What did you never think?" "That on our second day you would be satirical." He did not know the exact meaning of the word, took it to mean the saying of what you do not precisely intend. He protested: "I said what I felt. Mayn't I do that? I didn't think it would hurt you, really, I didn't. Linda, I---- "Oh, you have such a heavy, stodgy mind. You always mean much more than you can say. And you don't know how uncomfortable it is." She had always been able to make him, in flashes, interested in himself. Now her words came on him in faint illumination. He stood pondering it. "I can't help it," he said slowly, "I'm made like that. I can't be comfortable." Her answer seemed to him to clinch the hostility between them, to bring it, to his intense relief, out into the open. "I know you can't," she said, "but I can, and you mustn't spoil it for me." He was so grateful to her for this relief that he caught hold of her and cried: "Oh, Linda, if I thought I had spoiled your happiness, I would----" "What would you do?" "I don't know. But I would move heaven and earth to give it back to you." "I believe you would, and that makes me love you."