Some birds are that way

　　`But why are you such a lonely bird?' Connie asked him; and again he looked at her, with his full, searching, hazel look.

　　`Some birds are that way,' he replied. Then, with a touch of familiar irony: `but, look here, what about yourself? Aren't you by way of being a lonely bird yourself?' Connie, a little startled, thought about it for a few moments, and then she said: `Only in a way! Not altogether, like you!'

　　`Am I altogether a lonely bird?' he asked, with his queer grin of a smile, as if he had toothache; it was so wry, and his eyes were so perfectly unchangingly melancholy, or stoical, or disillusioned or afraid.

　　`Why?' she said, a little breathless, as she looked at him. `You are, aren't you?'

　　She felt a terrible appeal coming to her from him, that made her almost lose her balance.

　　`Oh, you're quite right!' he said, turning his head away, and looking sideways, downwards, with that strange immobility of an old race that is hardly here in our present day. It was that that really made Connie lose her power to see him detached from herself.

　　He looked up at her with the full glance that saw everything, registered everything. At the same time, the infant crying in the night was crying out of his breast to her, in a way that affected her very womb.

　　`It's awfully nice of you to think of me,' he said laconically.

　　`Why shouldn't I think of you?' she exclaimed, with hardly breath to utter it.

　　He gave the wry, quick hiss of a laugh.

　　`Oh, in that way!...May I hold your hand for a minute?' he asked suddenly, fixing his eyes on her with almost hypnotic power, and sending out an appeal that affected her direct in the womb.