explain better sitting down."

A felled trunk had been placed against the trees facing towards the
parkland. They went to it and he sat beside her. She sat upright but
bending forward a little over her crossed knees, her hands clasped on
them, looking before her across the park.

"No, you must look at me," he said.

She very slowly turned her body towards him. He thought her most
beautiful and the expression of her beautiful face was most terrible to
him in all his emotions.

V

She spoke very slowly; almost with a perceptible pause between each
word. She said, "Well, I'll tell you. I said 'flotsam', didn't I? If I
explain that--you know what flotsam is, Marko. Have you ever looked it
up in the dictionary? The dictionary says it terribly. 'Goods
shipwrecked and found floating on the sea.' I'm twenty-eight, Marko. I
suppose that's not really very old. It seems a terrible age to me. You
see, you judge age by what you are in contrast with what you were. If
you're very happy I think it can't matter how old you are. If you look
back to when you were happy and then come to the now when you're not, it
seems a most terrible and tremendous gulf--and you see yourself just
floating--drifting farther and farther away from the happy years and
just being taken along, taken along, to God knows where, God knows to
what." She put out the palms of her hands towards where misty evening
banked sombrely across the park. "That's very frightening, Marko."

The live thing ran beneath the leaves banked at their feet. A stronger
gust came in the air. A scattering of leaves clustered together and
moved with sudden agitation across the sward before them; paused and
seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly
at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed
to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward,
sported aloft in mazy arabesques, scattered upon the breeze.

"Those leaves!" she said. And as if she had not made the interjection
she went on, "Most awfully frightening. Well, all the time there was
you, Marko. You were always different from anybody I ever knew. Long ago
I used to chaff you because you were so different. In those two years
when we were away it got awful. In those two years I knew I was flotsam.
One day--in India--I went and looked at it in the little dictionary in
my writing case, and I knew I was. Do you know what I did? I crossed out
flotsam