Anne had left the cottage and gone away. He was to do what he liked with the place. Evidently the past with its memory was too distasteful to Anne. She was going to begin somewhere else. For a moment Roger felt a touch of the old anxiety, the need to look after Anne, manage and arrange for her; the feeling that she was too frail and fair to look out for herself, the feeling that had amused Anne so in the days of their engagement when, if she were a little late in meeting him, he was always afraid that something terrible had happened.
It passed and was gone, blotted in his clear understanding of how perfectly well Anne was able to look out for herself. That frail fairness, that delicate sensitiveness behind which she tripped with such deep assurance of herself, was almost a masque in the completeness with which it hid the real Anne. Life would present no problem that would trouble or perplex her. With the scalpel of her assurance she would delicately remove all emotion, all passion, all hot, human weakness, wrap it neatly in her own conceit, label it and forever after know exactly where she had put it.
Roger drew a sheet of paper to him and began writing to Belle. At least she had no right to withhold information of his son. But when he had written two angry pages he read them and tore them up. Finally in words, as blunt and straightforward as Belle, he demanded to know Rogie's whereabouts. When this was sealed and addressed, he pushed it aside to mail when he went out, and picked up the other letter.
He read it only this once and then it fluttered between his knees and lay upon the floor. His chin dropped to his breast, his lips closed in a hard line. Now that Anne had done this thing, his own surprise in not having thought of the possibility was lost in his understanding of how perfectly this action expressed Anne.
When two people loved, they came together in legal sanction.
When they no longer loved, they separated legally.
Anne would no more live apart without the ceremony of divorce than she would have lived with him without the ceremony of marriage.
Anne had tidied the situation.
She had instituted her action for divorce and gone away. She had put the little period of her standard to the past, blotted the paper and ordered it sent to him. It was almost like sending him a receipt for the old love, the months of bickering strain, itemized and receipted in full.
Roger made a strange little noise, a kind of choking grunt of amusement, anger and hurt. Across the loft Katya looked up. The clicking of her machine stopped suddenly. Over it she gazed at Roger with passionate longing, pain and anger and tenderness in her small brown eyes.