like a star balanced with another star.’

‘I don’t trust you when you drag in the stars,’ she said. ‘If you were quite true, it wouldn’t be necessary to be so far-fetched.’

‘Don’t trust me then,’ he said, angry. ‘It is enough that I trust myself.’

‘And that is where you make another mistake,’ she replied. ‘You DON’T trust yourself. You don’t fully believe yourself what you are saying. You don’t really want this conjunction, otherwise you wouldn’t talk so much about it, you’d get it.’

He was suspended for a moment, arrested.

‘How?’ he said.