"What ways?"
......
"I said, what ways?"
....... "What ways of Dwarves are so mysterious to you?"
Legolas fell back. "That again? It was. . . my question was ill-timed. Leave it. Like a hound with a bone, you are."
"Or a Dwarf with a notion. Well? We have all the time you need now. Ask away. What of our ways would you know more of?"
It was Legolas' turn to sigh. Gimli watched him fold his hands on his chest carefully. "What I meant was. . . love. I know not the ways of Dwarves when it comes to love."
"Oh." If Gimli was startled, he did not show it. He waggled a brow in his friend's direction. .........
"Oh, Elbereth," Legolas muttered, rolling over. "I said, leave it."
Gimli was silent, baffled at the re-emergence of Legolas's strange prickliness. He smoked for a while, watching the stars, thinking. The fire sparked and flamed as the logs crumbled to soft redness, and still Gimli smoked and thought.
"The ways of Dwarves in love," be began at last, as though reading from a lore-book. Legolas was still. "The ways of Dwarves in love," he repeated, "are hard to discover, even to a Dwarf. We have no songs that speak of love, as do you, no high tales from olden days of forbidden loves and doomed lovers. These would make no sense to my people. Why love where you cannot hope to be loved in return? Or where there is only death and destruction at the end of the path? We are a practical folk, above all. Love is for the begetting of children, for the honour of family and home. Love that does not bend to the will of the lover, that cannot be uprooted -- what sense would we find in that?"
Gimli refilled his pipe and held his flint to it, sucking sharp smoke. Legolas watched him.
"So," he resumed. "Do I have it right? That is how Elves see us, is it not? Hard, stern, unlovely and unloving?"
"Not all Elves," Legolas said softly.
"Ay. That I know. But that is what you thought before, yes?"
"Yes. I admit it. But what thought you of the ways of Elves?"
Another long drag, and a wreath of smoke. "Treacherous. Perfidious. Fair-seeming, and ill-meaning. Proud. Contemptuous. Unyielding. Arrogant. Meddlesome. Hungry for rule. Un-"
"All right!"
Gimli caught the flash of Legolas' grin. "And now?" asked the Elf.
"Oh. Well, now, of course, I see things quite differently. I no longer think Elves treacherous."
----------------------
He neatly ducked the clod of earth Legolas shied at his head, and chuckled. Again and again he replayed the words of the afternoon in his head, weighing each one, pushing aside his own irritation to find the true meaning. It was like shaping a gemstone. Shaping could not be done in anger or haste, with one's own emotions clouding the tap of the hammer. You must let the stone show you what it wanted to be, and you must follow where it meandered, and not where you willed it to go. Tap, tap, tap and wait, was the rhythm of it. Young and inexperienced craftsmen, who knew not the ways of stone or diamonds, were puzzled by the rhythm, and did not understand what the waiting was for. Their elders knew it was for listening.