--I don't know. Never mind, he said lowering his eyes again. --It's just that I... sometimes I feel my face and... or I feel myself moving or looking at something in a way that I... well never mind, never mind that. Never mind it then.
Suggestion of the smile she had not smiled faded from her face, and quiety she said, --All right.
—-But no, I mean, I don’t know. Sometimes I do, sometimes I almost do, and then I lose it. Like a story I heard once, a friend of mine told me, somebody I used to know, a story about a forged painting. It was a forged Titian that somebody had painted over another old painting, when they scraped the forged Titian away they found some worthless old painting underneath it, the forger had used it because it was an old canvas. But then there was something under that worthless painting, and they scraped it off and underneath that they found a Titian, a real Titian that had been there all the time. It was as though when the forger was working, and he didn’t know the original was underneath, I mean he didn’t know he knew it, but it knew, I mean something knew. I mean, do you see what I mean? That underneath that the original is there, that the real … thing is there, and on the surface you … if you can only … see what I mean?
She had rested her head back and closed her eyes. He put his arm over her shoulders, and she sat forward.
-Esme ... The brief strokes of anxiety and sharp strokes of detail broke the fragments of expression on his face, and he seemed able to catch none of them and fix it congruent upon the image of original honesty which he clutched at so desparately beneath the surface, and the second surface, with each instant more confused in the successsion of mocking streaks of parody which he could not control. A moment came when he might have thought, and even understood; but he had not time to embrace it, and it passed. --It's just ... damn it, Esme ...