His reply was, “We’ll rip out this fireplace and put you in one in oak; the walls something between gold and brown, eh? Now come into the drawing-room. This’ll be the room. Let’s start with the hearth and imagine it’s winter. This is where we’ll have tea the days when I get back in time—”
“And when I get back in time.”
“Of course, I’d forgotten that. Why, then whichever of us is back first will be all ready with the tea and waiting to welcome the other. Can’t you see the room? Warm, shadowed, glowing here and there, here and there gleaming, and the tea table shining? Won’t it be a place to rush back to? I say, Rosalie, it’s going to be rather wonderful, isn’t it?”
Dear Harry! Yes, men that married for a home.
So she had known that from the start; and, the significant thing (as later perceived) she never had mentioned it to Harry. There was not a line of her life, as lived before she knew him, that she had not revealed to him; there was not a passage of her life, when joined to his, that was not handed to him to write upon; but this, that she knew he’d married for a home, was never revealed, never inscribed upon the tablets submitted daily for his annotation.
Yes, significant!
But how could its significance have been perceived? Look here, there had been a night—a thousand years ago!—when a girl had turned her face to her pillow and cried, most frightfully. Significant! Why, that girl’s world had lain in atoms at the significance of that girl’s grief. And she that now looked back had been born out of those tears, as the first woman drawn from the side of the first man, and fondly had chid that child that no significance was there at all. There was none. There was nothing to fear. A natural joy of life that had been stifled had been embraced, a shattered world had been remoulded on foundings firmer and, ah, nearer to the heart’s desire. Significant! It had been so disproved that not more possibly could fears arise from those, her lovely dissipations of those fears, than from its watchful mother’s reassuring candle and her soothing words new terrors to a frightened child at night.
Then how, she used to ask herself, could significance have been perceived in not admitting Harry to her smiling thought on men and home? Significance—then? Nay, memory bear witness, much, much the contrary! Bear witness, memory, it was that very thought of Harry as boy with cave, as man with home, had suddenly suffused her with...
“Dear Harry!” she had thought, and with the thought...
Anna! That cry of Anna’s upon that frightening night, striking her hands against her bosom, “I have a longing—here!” Never till then its meaning nor even thought upon its meaning.