A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

Anthony looked down miserably for a moment at her flushed face. He knew that she was excited, exalted, moved by a sudden impulse. But why was he to pay less attention to this impulse, this mood, than to the mood that had gone before? The main thing was that she loved him. He put his arms round her, unable for the moment to find speech. "Little Rose," he told her at last, "I will be good to you, honestly I will. I do want you so badly, and if you love me I can't feel that it's wrong!"

Rosemary, trembling and clinging close to him, found that she was crying.

She dried her tears hastily, left him, and went back to her chair. She took the knitting on to her lap, but forgot to go on with it. She was glad she had done what she had, but she had not, all the same, left off being afraid. It did make a difference being married—it must. It had made, people said, "a woman" of Laura. She didn't want to be a woman, she thought. Most women were cowardly creatures, lazy, ridden by feeling, immersed in their own little pools of happiness or discontent. She liked girls, she liked being a girl, ignorant and adventurous, with nothing in her life about which she could not speak and be honest. When you married the most important things in the world were private, secret things, you shared them with one other person, you lost your sense of the freedom, the spaciousness, of life. Laura had said that once, even Laura hadn't lost what she'd lost without regretting it. It wasn't that she didn't love Tony, she loved him so much that she was happy to be giving up everything for him, but she regretted herself, the self that was soon to be changed into a wife and a mother. She liked the world, she liked adventures; a wife is shut away from adventure, a mother shuts the world away from her children. She consoled herself by thinking that every woman who marries young has had these thoughts.

Meanwhile Anthony fidgeted. He was never easy under prolonged sentimental tension, and he did not want to think now of the scene they had just been through. He wanted, leaving that as a background of general exultation, to talk about a house he had seen that morning. It was to let; he wasn't sure that it mightn't do. But he realised that while Rosemary's expression remained what it was it would be extraordinarily tactless to talk about the house. His nerves were a little upset, and the house obsessed him, he could think of no other topic. As he sat silent, looking a little gloomy, he tried to make out from the front of it how many rooms the house would be likely to have. The rent was £70. With the rates that would be £95.

They were both glad when the door opened and showed them Mrs. Heyham. Mary had come, a little nervous, to find out from her daughter the names of books that she would do well to read, without, at the same time, discussing the subject or giving rise to any thoughts that were critical of James. She greeted Anthony kindly, and would have kissed Rosemary, but Rosemary's cheeks had flushed too lately under other kisses, and she did not approach her mother in a way that made this possible. Mary understood the refusal, and her own cheeks reddened. She had been hoping that these new interests of hers would bring her nearer to Rosemary.

For a moment they all waited, then Mary sat down and asked whether the walking-tour had been a success. She had forgotten, quite suddenly, the careful arrangement she had made of what she was going to say. Two days ago she had wondered whether she shouldn't tell Rosemary everything, but finally she had decided that she would not. Florrie's story was not easy to tell, and she found, besides, that she was shy of exposing her own doubtful and troubled mind. The child, with her different ideas, might dislike her mother's emotions, resent her confidences. She had clinched the matter by recalling the loyalty she herself owed to James.

So at last, when she had gathered courage, she began very carefully, "Do you remember, darling, six months ago, when we thought of my starting this little investigation, you offered to lend me some books?"

Rosemary remembered. "Oh, yes—you didn't read them, did you?"

Mary was prepared for that. "No, I didn't. Your father and I thought that as I hadn't time for studying the question seriously I had better begin with an unprejudiced mind. But now I've seen a certain amount for myself I should like to know what more competent people think." She smiled.

Rosemary knew this tone of her mother's, knew it to mean that Mary was reserving something, probably the most important thing. The tone chafed her now as it had when she first understood it, as a child. Why had her mother never spoken of what she was doing?—Rosemary supposed that she must have given some promise to her husband, or to Trent. "How stuffy it all is," she told herself, "never any honest discussion! Always secrets and hiding things in corners!" When she answered it was in the slightly stiff tone with which she always met what seemed to her a disingenuous excess of tact.