“It is only a word.” Now it is he who consoles. “A lovely word. One that speaks of the heart.”
“All my life...” she says.
Still trembling slightly nonetheless she speaks in a modulated tone, a blend of controlled embarrassment and minor sorrow, looking out the one window as if seeking the past there.
“All my life,” she says, “and mark you, this is meant to be a pretty speech. All my life I have lived with words. I was a girl in a Polish woods and a queen in games so that I could curl in the boughs of a tree and read my books while the others ran off chasing dragons or saving the true cross from the pagan Moors. For me it was as the poem of Milocz says,Jakbys dlugo i dlugo zyl, czeknajac na to, ‘as if life has prepared you for this...’ In gymnasium I learn English and the Brontës. I write poems and learn to count to one million in English. As other girls are collecting dolls I am collecting English words: fragrant, lapses, tortoise...”
“Ardent?” he suggests.
“No, this is recent,” she says calmly, her color returned, the flush receded. “Do I use this word incorrectly? or only too frequently for common speech?”
“Who knows what’s common?” he says.
She turns to address him directly. The midnight eyes fix on him.
“Do not defer this,” she says, “nor excuse it as just a trick of words or a woman’s speech. I am an educated person. An attorney knows what is common, what is ceremony, and what is mere formula. Do you think it a coincidence, I wonder, that you question my speech at exactly the moment that what I say shames you and challenges your comfortable assumption that you alone know what is right?”
He starts to protest, she literally waves him off.
“No matter, no matter,” she says, “there is no need to defend your pride to me. You are correct, with me it is all a burning. What am I but a foolish woman far from her home and soliciting ardently for her husband.”
“And herself, damn it! What’s all this if it’s not a seduction of some kind? A chance for scented tea and flirting and high talk.”
“And hope,” she says, her eyes blazing damp.
“Yes, that,” he says. “We each need that. We all of us do, especially these children.”
“Bastard,” she says. “What do you know of hope or what we each need? High talk indeed! Goddamn you, yes of course it is a seduction of some kind. I seduce myself into some sense of grace. This is hope incarnate– there! there’s another of the doll words of a girl!– though you most likely think it is all a drama conducted for your benefit, a masque to take your mind off death and a rainy afternoon.”