"You're not very happy, are you?" he ventured, in a voice with just the slightest trace of _vibrato_ in it.
But I didn't see that anything was to be gained by parading my troubles before others. And life, of late, had been teaching me to consume my own smoke. So I kept silent.
"Do you like me, Peter?" I suddenly asked. For I felt absurdly safe with Peter. He has a heart, I know, as clean as an Alpine village, and the very sense of his remoteness, as I'd already told him, gives birth to a sort of intimacy, like the factory girl who throws a kiss to the brakeman on the through freight and remains Artemis-on-ice to the delicatessen-youth from whom she buys her supper "weenies."
"What do you suppose I've been hanging around for?" demanded Peter, with what impressed me as an absence of finesse.
"To fix the windmill, of course," I told him. "Unless you have improper designs on Struthers!"
He laughed a little and looked up at the Great Bear.
"If it's true, as they say, that Fate weaves in the dark, I suppose that's why she weaves so badly," he observed, after a short silence.
"She undoubtedly drops a stitch now and then," I agreed, wondering if he was thinking of me or Struthers when he spoke. "But you do like me, don't you?"
"I adore you," admitted Peter quite simply.
"In the face of all these?" I said with a contented little laugh, nodding toward my three children.
"In the face of everything," asserted Peter.
"Then I wish you'd do something for me," I told him.
"Break that woman's heart," I announced, with a backward nod of my head toward Casa Grande.
"I'd much rather break _yours_," he coolly contended. "Or I'd prefer knowing I had the power of doing it."
I shook my head. "It can't be done, Peter. And it can't even be pretended. Imagine the mother of twins trying to flirt with a man even as nice as you are! It would be as bad as an elephant trying to be kittenish and about as absurd as one of your dinosauria getting up and trying to do a two-step. And I'm getting old and prosy, Peter, and if I pretend to be skittish now and then it's only to mask the fact that I'm on the shelf, that I've eaten my pie and that before long I'll be dyeing my hair every other Sunday, the same as Struthers, and----"