"Do I like her? I've spoken perhaps ten sentences to her and vice-versa. It takes me longer to like people than that unless they're truly exceptional."

"She fears that you don't," he says, sitting on the floor and resting his chin on her knee. "It troubles her."

"I don't say it's reasonable or it isn't," he says, "but that's how she feels, so I told her I'd ask."

Belle shrugs. "Are you getting along with her all right?"

"More or less," he says. "She's very snuggly."

"Is she anything else?"

He thinks it over, and the word he comes up with is, "Desperate."

"Desperate? For what? Why?"

"Well, gently desperate," he says. "Subtly desperate. But—she wants everyone to like her."

"...Literally?"

He nods his fluffy head.

"That's even stranger than it sounds, when I think about it," muses Belle. "Everyone in the world? She can't even meet everyone in the world."

"It may be that she only cares about the ones she has met, or will meet," he says. "I'm not sure."

"So she didn't tell you this outright - how can you tell?"

"What she said, how she said it, how she acted, how she seemed to feel."

"Huh. Ironically," says Belle, "I don't think I find that an appealing quality."

"I'm frightening?"

"Frightening like thunderstorms," he says affectionately.

"Is she also frightening like some kind of weather?"

"No," he says. "She's frightening like... I'm not sure. You can hurt me, but you won't, if I don't want you to. She can't, but I think she would."

"But the curse thinks you could fall in love with her. And vice versa."

"Sometimes I like frightening."