His eyes are sometimes closed and sometimes open.
The woman sits beside him, very attentive to the pipe, which is all
the while at his lips.
'I'll warrant,' she observes, when he has been looking fixedly at
her for some consecutive moments, with a singular appearance in his
eyes of seeming to see her a long way off, instead of so near him:
'I'll warrant you made the journey in a many ways, when you made it
so often?'
'No, always in one way.'
'Always in the same way?'
'Ay.'
'In the way in which it was really made at last?'
'Ay.'
'And always took the same pleasure in harping on it?'
'Ay.'
For the time he appears unequal to any other reply than this lazy
monosyllabic assent. Probably to assure herself that it is not the
assent of a mere automaton, she reverses the form of her next
sentence.
'Did you never get tired of it, deary, and try to call up something
else for a change?'
He struggles into a sitting posture, and retorts upon her: 'What
do you mean? What did I want? What did I come for?'
She gently lays him back again, and before returning him the
instrument he has dropped, revives the fire in it with her own
breath; then says to him, coaxingly:
'Sure, sure, sure! Yes, yes, yes! Now I go along with you. You
was too quick for me. I see now. You come o' purpose to take the
journey. Why, I might have known it, through its standing by you
so.'
He answers first with a laugh, and then with a passionate setting
of his teeth: 'Yes, I came on purpose.
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