Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly disguised. So James was embarking on his little affairs, was he? It seemed incredible, and also, as she looked at her husband’s face—the face behind its bristlingly manly mask of a harassed baby—also rather pathetically absurd. She wondered who it could be. But she displayed no curiosity. She would find out soon enough.
“I’m sorry you should have been unhappy about it,” she said.
“It’s finished now.” Shearwater made a decided little gesture.
“Ah, no!” said Rosie. “You should persevere.” She looked at him, smiling.
Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy detachment. He had imagined the conversation so very differently, as something so serious, so painful and, at the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did not know how to go on. “But I thought,” he said hesitatingly, “that you ... that we ... after this experience ... I would try to get closer to you....” (Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) ... “We might start again, from a different place, so to speak.”
“But, cher ami,” protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the preferred tongue of Mr. Mercaptan, “you can’t seriously expect us to do the Darby and Joan business, can you? You’re distressing yourself quite unnecessarily on my account. I don’t find you neglect me or anything like it. You have your life—naturally. And I have mine. We don’t get in one another’s way.”
“But do you think that’s the ideal sort of married life?” asked Shearwater.
“It’s obviously the most civ—vilized,” Rosie answered, laughing.
Confronted by Rosie’s civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.
“Well, if you don’t want,” he said. “I’d hoped ... I’d thought....”