We didn’t shake down into comfort even with the coming of the tea-things.  Tea at the gardener’s cottage was a serious meal, with a big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon a table.  You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied, perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in Nettie, saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all the eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four hours, miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind.  Nettie’s father tried to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready speech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and astonished him to hear me pouring out my views.  Indeed, over there I was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a shy young lout.  “You ought to write it out for the newspapers,” he used to say.  “That’s what you ought to do.  I never heard such nonsense.”

Or, “You’ve got the gift of the gab, young man.  We ought to ha’ made a lawyer of you.”

But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn’t shine.  Failing any other stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did not engage me.

Section 5

For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that before them all.  It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do something—­I forget now what—­in one of the greenhouses.  Whatever that little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse, a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.

Nettie hesitated and obeyed.  She led the way through one of the hot-houses.  It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned on me suddenly like a creature at bay.

“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with eyes that said, “Now.”

“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”

She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face.  But she said nothing, and stood waiting.

“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you.  I—­I love you.”

“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the things you do to me?”

“I don’t mean them,” I said.  “At least not always.”

I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of the impossibility of conveying that to her.