Well, really, now she came to think of it all again, it had been too queer, too queer.
“What’s a hedonist?” she suddenly asked.
Shearwater looked up from the Journal of Biochemistry. “What?” he said.
“A hedonist.”
“A man who holds that the end of life is pleasure.”
A ‘conscientious hedonist’—ah, that was good.
“This tea is cold,” Shearwater remarked.
“You should have drunk it before,” she said. The silence renewed and prolonged itself.
Rosie was getting much better, Shearwater reflected, as he washed his hands before supper, about not interrupting him when he was busy. This evening she had really not disturbed him at all, or at most only once, and that not seriously. There had been times in the past when the child had really made life almost impossible. There were those months at the beginning of their married life, when she had thought she would like to study physiology herself and be a help to him. He remembered the hours he had spent trying to teach her elementary facts about the chromosomes. It had been a great relief when she abandoned the attempt. He had suggested she should go in for stencilling patterns on Government linen. Such pretty curtains and things one could make like that. But she hadn’t taken very kindly to the idea. There had followed a long period when she seemed to have nothing to do but prevent him from doing anything. Ringing him up at the laboratory, invading his study, sitting on his knee, or throwing her arms round his neck, or pulling his hair, or asking ridiculous questions when he was trying to work.
Shearwater flattered himself that he had been extremely patient. He had never got cross. He had just gone on as though she weren’t there. As though she weren’t there.