She had put out both her hands and taken one of his. “It’s splendid, Harry. It’s too splendid. How delighted I am, and proud, proud! No one would have imagined it at the beginning. What a triumph it will be for you!”
His grasp squeezed hers in fond response. “Why, it won’t do me any harm,” he agreed. His tone was light. He released his hand and took up a cup of tea, and his tone went deep. “Mind you, I’m glad about it,” he said, and stirred the spoon thoughtfully within the cup. He had come into the room declaring he was dying for some tea, but he had touched none, and he now replaced the cup untasted on the table and she saw on his face the deep “inward” look that she knew (and loved) for the sign of intense concentration of his mind. “Yes, glad,” he spoke; his voice, as was its habit when he was “inward,” sounding as though it was the involuntary, and not the intentional, utterance of his thoughts. “I’ve gone all out over this case. I saw, the minute they briefed me, that one tiny flaw, his neglect to take up that option—you remember, I told you—right down at the bottom of the whole tangle, and I went plumb down for it and hung on to it and fought it up like, like a diver coming up from fathoms down.”
She had a quickness of imagery. It constantly delighted him. “Yes, that’s good,” she declared. “Up like a diver, Harry. Not with goggles and a helmet and all that, but shot up like a flash, all shining and glistening and triumphant with the jewel aloft. What a shout there’d be! Dear Harry! You’re splendid!”
He smiled most lovingly. “As a matter of fact, I feel I ought to make a mess of it. It’ll be the first big case since we’ve been together that, while it’s been on, we haven’t had talks about. You couldn’t, of course, with this so near to you. It would be significant, and proper, if I drowned in it.”
She shook her head. “Absurd! Why, the thing I’m most glad about, Harry, is that all this”—she indicated with a gesture her pose, her dress, her condition—“that all this hasn’t in the least upset your work. It might have. It hasn’t—and when it happens, it won’t, will it?”
Harry said, “I’m rather ashamed to say it hasn’t, in the least. I’ve thought of you, often, but I’ve simply put the thought away. And when it happens, I shall think of you—terribly—going through it; and of the small thing—But we shall be in the crisis of the case and I shall have to forget you. I’ll have to, Rosalie, as I have had to. The work must go on.”
She agreed emphatically. “Of course it must.” She then said, “Whereas mine—”
He did not attend her. The “inward” look was deep upon his face. There was the suggestion of a grimmish smile about his mouth. One could have guessed that he was rehearsing, with satisfaction, his enormous application while the work was going on.
She gave a sound of laughter, and that aroused him. “What’s the joke?”
“Why, just how this does rather illuminate the point—”