“Oh, you are back?” she said when he joined her. “I wanted to be there to give you your tea. Was it all right?”
“Perfectly,” he said. “We put in just your number of spoonfuls.”
Mrs. Baldwin wore her little knitted jacket and had put on her white, rubber-soled canvas shoes against the wet; but her head, with its thick, close braids, was bare to the sunlight.
“I had to come out as soon as it stopped raining,” she said; “and I’m afraid I simply forgot to look out for you and father.”
Her gentleness had always seemed contentment; this afternoon it seemed happiness, and he had never seen her look so young. He wondered if she were going to take him so dreadfully aback as not even to mention his poems; if she had simply forgotten them, too. Already her demeanour, unclouded, almost radiant, inflicted a wound; she had either forgotten, or she had cared little indeed, since she could look like that. But, after he had commented, consentingly, on the lovely hour, she went on with a change of tone, a voice a little shy, “I’ve read the poems. Thank you so much for letting me see them.”
“You read all of them?”
“Yes. I didn’t write my letters.”
“I hope you read them, then, because you cared for them.”
She didn’t answer for a moment, walking along and placing the small white feet carefully among the crocuses. “They are very sad,” she then said.
He was aware, after an instant of adjustment to the blow, that she made him very angry. Terrible, his poems, searing, scorching; wicked, if one would; but not sad.