She clumped away and a moment later Roger heard her heavy step going down the stairs. He stayed for another hour, staring out into the night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Now that he had worded aloud the idea of leaving Anne, the thought was always with him.
Spiritual freedom. He wished for no other. The man in the street might talk as if sex were a devouring hunger, a ravening wolf ready to spring upon one unexpectedly at any moment. But sex without companionship nauseated him to visualize. There might be moments—these he would deal with when they arose. Now, the wind of spiritual freedom carried no taint of lesser, fiercer need.
How did Anne feel? Perhaps she, too, would welcome freedom. He had visioned restrictions binding him alone. Perhaps Anne, too, was bound.
The need to know consumed Roger's thought and his impatience with smaller issues. As one forgives trivial failings in the face of a great crisis, Roger grew strangely gentle and forbearing. He rarely left home in the evenings now, and Anne often felt his eyes on her questioningly, as she sat sewing under the lamp. For she rarely read; she so often forgot to turn the pages.
It was one evening, about three weeks after he had talked with Katya, that Roger looked up to see Anne almost immersed under a billow of white material. Usually Anne's work was something small and compact, and more than once he had traced fanciful analogies between the short, swift movements of Anne's needle, mending a jagged hole in a sock, and the mental methods of the world of Mitchells. It was with such little stabs that they attempted to draw together the holes of life, patch it for what?—a few more wearings at best. But to-night, as if in keeping with the wonder of Anne's attitude to freedom, she was engaged on larger work.
He laid his book aside and asked with real interest:
"What's that?"
Anne started. They scarcely ever broke in on each other's occupations any more.