Would Anne understand? Once he would have been sure. Now he did not know. He was getting to know less and less how Anne would stand on many questions. Last night she had seemed to grasp the power and soul of Tom O'Connell, and then, when the one great fetish of the sane and respectable middle class was violated, when the conventional sanctity of marriage was imperiled, Anne had retreated behind the great bourgeois virtue of "decency," as smug and prim and spiritually corseted as Hilary himself.
Roger went slowly up the long flight of steps and came on Anne, weeding the trailers from a border of violets. Bent so over the bed, her hands and arms spattered with rich black earth, her silvery blonde hair shining in the sun, Anne looked like a little girl. Tenderness touched Roger. Anne looked up.
"You've quit," she said quickly.
Roger nodded.
"I think I knew you would—last night." Anne rose and shook the loam from her fingers. Still her tone had told Roger nothing.
"Do you think I did wrong? Are you angry?"
"Why, Roger, what a silly question. If you felt it was wrong to work with him, of course you did right. And I would never be angry at your doing what you thought was right. I don't think that's quite fair, do you?"
And still Roger did not know how she really felt.
Anne picked up the basket and trowel and Roger took them from her.
"Finished? You look as if you had just started in." Ten minutes earlier Roger would have been disappointed that Anne could go on with the ordinary day's work in face of the great event; now he resented her silent attitude that the course of the day had been terminated by his act. He walked beside her to the kitchen door, but it seemed impossible to go in between walls and leave the pungent earth and blue sky.