"I am sorry if I upset you, Mr. Carnelian," she said kindly. "You are rather more direct than I have been used to, you see. I know that your manner is not deliberately offensive, that you are, in some ways, more innocent than I. But you have a way of saying the wrong thing — or sometimes the right thing in the wrong way."
He shrugged. "That is why I am so desperate for my moral education to begin. I love you, Mrs. Amelia Underwood. Perhaps it was Lord Jagged who encouraged me to affect the emotion in the first place, but since then it has taken hold of me. I am its slave. I can console myself, of course, but I cannot stop loving you."
"I am flattered."
"And you have said that you loved me, but now you try to deny it."
"I am still Mrs . Underwood," she pointed out gently.
The small mollusc began, tentatively, to crawl onto his foot. "And I am still Jherek Carnelian," he replied.
She noticed the mollusc. "Aha! Perhaps this one is edible."
As she reached down to inspect it, he stopped her with his hand on her shoulder. "No," he said. "Let it go."
She straightened up, smiling gently at him. "We cannot afford to be sentimental, Mr. Carnelian."
His hand remained for an instant on her shoulder. The worn, stiffened velvet was beginning to grow soft again. "We cannot afford not to be, I think."
Her grey eyes were serious; then she laughed. "Oh, very well. Let us wait, then, until we are extremely hungry." Gaily, with her black buttoned boots kicking at the fine sand of that primordial shore, she began to stride along beside the thick and salty sea.
she sang,
There was a certain defiance in her manner, a certain spirited challenge to the inevitable, which made Jherek gasp with devotion.
"Self-denial, after all," she called back over her shoulder, "is good for the soul!'
"Ah!" He began to run after her and then slowed before he had caught up. He stared around him at the calm, Silurian world, struck suddenly by the freshness of it all, by the growing understanding that they really were the only two mammals on this whole planet. He looked up at the huge, golden sun and he blinked in its benign glare. He was full of wonder.
A little later, panting, sweating, laughing, he fell in beside her. He noticed that her expression was almost tender as she turned to look at him.
He offered her his arm.
After a second's hesitation, she took it.
They strolled together through the hot, Silurian afternoon.
"Now, Mrs. Underwood," he said contentedly, "what is 'self-denial'?"