[ it had taken her a moment. first, to parse the line. and second to identify it. oh, its broader origins are obvious enough -- what schoolgirl or schoolboy doesn't grow to be intimately, agonizingly familiar with the cadence and fall of iambic pentameter?

(she might be surprised to learn that dusty old drama is no longer the staid presence in an adolescent's curriculum that it once was.)

but the academic exercise of identifying play and act and speaker is quickly aborted when -- quite off-script -- rip trespasses that funny little no man's land between their bodies. it was never surveyed and charted off by formal agreement, maybe, but there had persisted an unspoken understanding that here, afterwards, wasn't a time for idle affection.

peggy doesn't stop him. but she does watch him with a flicker of reproach. ]

Your quotation cuts both ways, you realize. [ she suspects he's trying to make some pretty argument about stripping wonderland of what little value it's got. not letting its amorphous powers-that-be rob them of what's good. peggy, meanwhile, makes it her business to make a far more prosaic argument. ] Because here you are -- robbed of something. Someone. And yet I don't see you smiling.

[ it's a rather obtuse observation. peggy knows it. sometimes, a smile isn't a smile at all -- but a heated and eager embrace, qualitatively different from the ones that came before it. harder and needier and with a more commanding grip than she'd come to expect. and, much like his smile (rare as it is), she wasn't disappointed in it. ]