Anne shrugged. "Since you don't know the extent of a flea's imagination, your figure hasn't much force, has it?"
Roger turned away and Anne went on with her work.
At two o'clock she left the office and went to the flat. But even here she was not needed as she once had been. On her return, Belle had installed a practical nurse three afternoons a week to relieve Hilda, and the woman had filled Anne's place completely. Anne went on the days she did not come, but she felt her in Hilda's accounts of how "she rests papa and manages him to perfection," and in James' constant references to things she said or did for him. Now that there was no need to fill hours with chatter, Anne missed the need. The empty relationship with her father was emptier than before.
In the vacuum of her isolation, Anne began to watch her thoughts, until she came to see them as minute machines, installed within her brain by some outside power, clicking away independent of her will. A power was working out some experiment with her, using her brain as if it were a dark room for the development of a film. Without emotion Anne watched the negative develop. She grew absorbed in the process. She often asked Roger to repeat a statement, and then sat motionless, watching its reaction, as if it were a stone he had dropped into the well of her intelligence. With judicial exactness she weighed the most trite remark, until conversation with Anne became impossible.
Roger escaped it when he could. Night after night, he stayed on at the office and Anne ate her dinner alone. Or he returned to work immediately after dinner, always courteous and insincere in his excuse. Anne saw the insincerity but never resented it. She was glad to have Roger go. When he stayed there was nothing real to talk about and the effort of making conversation with Roger was more exhausting than the lonely evening.
It was on a Sunday afternoon, after several such evenings in succession, that Anne sat pretending to read in her favorite place, a cushioned settle under the window that gave on the bay and hills beyond. It was a still day of little wind, but a dry, high fog hid the sun. It was three o'clock, the dreariest, the least personal of any hour of the day. The feeling of youth that morning has was gone. The positiveness of evening and lighted lamps had not yet come.
Roger had gone to the office in the morning, read for a little after lunch and was now asleep in the darkened room beyond, Rogie in the crib beside him. But he would not sleep much longer. Rogie would probably wake when he did and Roger would play a while with him. Then, unless Roger went to a meeting, they would sit, each absorbed or feigning absorption in his reading: Roger in some legal or economic work of vast pretension, Anne in her novel, a thing so far from life in the maudlin sentimentality, spread like soft icing over the relation between the man and the woman, that it would better have been frankly a fairytale. About them the silence of the dead hour would close and they would sit in peace as false as the stillness of the churches and small meeting rooms.
Anne thrust her book aside. If she went out to walk, the Sunday streets would echo the tread of others trying to kill the day in the same way. At the flat James would be asleep in his chair, Hilda napping in the dining-room. Anne leaned forward, her elbows on the sill, her chin in her palms. The Bay, flat and gray as if it, too, were exhausted from the week's work, stretched to the fog-crowned hills. Under the pall, the Sleeping Beauty on Tamalpais had passed to eternal rest. The commanded peace of the Seventh Day shut like a cover of lead upon the world.
Only Charlotte Welles could move beneath such grayness, unconscious of its deadening weight. She would be walking now, with her short, quick steps, straight to the peace she entered at her will. Anne moved uneasily, like a sick person resisting a desired opiate. Perhaps, if she went once again, and tried not to hear the hymns or the testimonies or the selected readings, if she slipped into the back seat, just before the meeting closed, she might yet grasp the secret and have it for her own.
In the room beyond, Rogie cried and Roger woke. She heard him lift the baby from its crib and in a moment they were laughing together. Then the blind went up with a noisy spring, and Roger came out, rested and carrying the delighted Rogie in his arms.