"I can go on not listening!"
Clarence accordingly did, while Joy kept her hands over her ears
till her arms were tired and Clarence apparently had no more to say.
Then she dropped them.
"I was reciting the Westminster catechism," Clarence observed blandly.
"I never waste my gems of conversation on deaf ears. Come, Joy of my
life, unbend a little. I don't mean a bit of harm in the world. All I
want is a kind word or two and the pleasure of your society."
Joy looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then laughed.
"If you were a poet, here is where you would tell me that the
fetters of wearying and sordid marriage were not for you--that they
wore on your genius," she said unexpectedly.
Clarence gasped. It must have been very much like having the kitten
suddenly turn and offer him rational conversation.
"_Et tu_, Laetitia!" he said in a neat and scholarly manner.
"Joy, you have cruelly deceived me--I thought you were a simple
child of nature."
"I don't know a bit what I am," she answered truthfully, "but the
poets at Grandfather's did talk that way--not to me, but to other
people--and you sounded like them. You aren't really a poet, are you?"
"Well, I've never been overt about it," he evaded. He did not know
what to make of Joy, any more than ever.
Joy, trailing the end of a braid absently in the water, thought a
minute longer, then looked up at him.
"It seems to me," she said suddenly, "that you just mock and mock at
things all the time.
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