I've been like a lamb to Sarah.
I've only put my back to the wall. It's to THAT one naturally
staggers when one has been violently pushed there."
She watched him a moment. "Thrown over?"
"Well, as I feel I've landed somewhere I think I must have been thrown."
She turned it over, but as hoping to clarify much rather than to
harmonise. "The thing is that I suppose you've been disappointing--"
"Quite from the very first of my arrival? I dare say. I admit I
was surprising even to myself."
"And then of course," Maria went on, "I had much to do with it."
"With my being surprising--?"
"That will do," she laughed, "if you're too delicate to call it MY
being! Naturally," she added, "you came over more or less for
surprises."
"Naturally!"--he valued the reminder.
"But they were to have been all for you"--she continued to piece it
out--"and none of them for HER."
Once more he stopped before her as if she had touched the point.
"That's just her difficulty--that she doesn't admit surprises.
It's a fact that, I think, describes and represents her; and it
falls in with what I tell you--that she's all, as I've called it,
fine cold thought. She had, to her own mind, worked the whole
thing out in advance, and worked it out for me as well as for
herself.
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