But, for the first time, the room was not hideous to Anne. The damp smell of Roger's clothes, the lingering cigarette smoke, filled it with a throbbing vitality it had never had. She felt Roger's masculinity in the very air and it made the few small remarks she managed to catch from the whirling mass of feeling seem thin and artificial.
Roger tried to fill the silence with remarks to Rogie; by tickling him and riding him on his foot. For a while it succeeded. Then Rogie grew tired. His eyes filmed; he leaned more heavily on his father's shoulder.
Roger tried to keep him awake, but Rogie objected with impatient jerks, and Roger looked to Anne. In a few moments he would be asleep. Then he and Anne would be faced by the need to fill the silence or he would have to go.
"He's just about asleep. Perhaps I'd better carry him to bed. He must be awfully heavy for you."
"No, I'll take him. That's something no one seems to do just right. He wakes even if Mrs. Jeffries tries to carry him at this stage, and usually he's as good with her as with me."
She took Rogie from him and Roger watched her go, so small and fair herself. He heard her go slowly up the stairs, for Rogie was indeed a heavy weight for her slight arms.
Again it was still.
Anne put Rogie down, stayed a moment to make sure he would not wake, turned out the light and opened the window. Again the smell of smoke drifted to her and now she heard Roger's step walking up and down as he had used to walk in anger at Hilary Wainwright.
Up and down the long, narrow room Roger walked, trying to force the chaos of thought to ordered sequence by the rhythm of his step. He could not go back to the cottage which Anne had made beautiful and leave her and Rogie in this dismal place. No matter whether Anne had grown indifferent to her surroundings or not, he hated to think of his boy, even as a baby, absorbing impressions of that horsehair furniture and onyx stand. And in imagination he saw sharply Mrs. Jeffries, whom they represented, a dull, thin woman like the aunt who had brought him up. Anne hated to face new situations, and, if she had indeed persuaded herself that this was not so bad, she would go on living here year after year. Roger shuddered. What Anne chose to do was no longer his concern, although the old need to protect rose in him, untinged by any personal emotion, almost against his will. He wanted Anne to be happy and have the things she liked. But Rogie was very definitely his concern; not only his duty, but with the feel of the fat little body as vivid in his arms as when he had held him, Rogie was the deepest motive of his life.
He was just turning again at the far end of the room when Anne returned. He looked up quickly, still frowning over the problem, but said, with a strange, new hesitancy and unsureness: