I want to talk."
"You can't. I'd better talk to you."
"No," I said, "I want to talk to you."
She came and stood by my bedside and looked me in the eyes. "I don't--I
don't want you to talk to me," she said. "I thought you couldn't talk."
"I get few chances--of you."
"You'd better not talk. Don't talk now. Let me chatter instead. You
ought not to talk."
"It isn't much," I said.
"I'd rather you didn't."
"I'm not going to be disfigured," I said. "Only a scar."
"Oh!" she said, as if she had expected something quite different. "Did
you think you'd become a sort of gargoyle?"
"L'Homme qui Rit!--I didn't know. But that's all right. Jolly flowers
those are!"
"Michaelmas daisies," she said. "I'm glad you'r not disfigured, and
those are perennial sunflowers. Do you know no flowers at all? When I
saw you on the ground I certainly thought you were dead. You ought to
have been, by all the rules of the game."
She said some other things, but I was thinking of my next move.
"Are we social equals?" I said abruptly.
She stared at me.
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