Back at Casa Grande I found Dinkie and Whinnie beside the bunk-house stove, struggling companionably through the opening chapters of Treasure Island. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but 240 his mind, I could see, was intent on the page along which Whinnie’s stubbled finger was crawling like a plowshare beside each furrow of text. He was in the South Pacific, a thousand miles away from me. In my own house Struthers was putting a petulant-voiced Poppsy to bed, and Gershom, up in his room, was making extraordinary smells at his chemistry experiments. Susie I found curled comfortably up in front of the fire, idling over my first volume of Jean Christophe.
She read three sentences aloud as I sat down beside her. “How happy he is! He is made to be happy!...Life will soon see to it that he is brought to reason.”
She seemed to expect some comment from me, but I found myself with nothing to say. In fact, we both sat there for a long time, staring in silence at the fire.
“Why do you live with a man you don’t love?” she suddenly asked out of the utter stillness.
It startled me, that question. It also embarrassed me, for I could feel my color mount as Susie’s lapis-lazuli eyes rested on my face.
“What makes you think I don’t love him?” I countered, reminding myself that Susie, after all, was still a girl in her teens. 241
“It’s not a matter of thinking,” was Susie’s quiet retort. “I know you don’t.”
“Then I wish I could be equally certain,” I said with a defensive stiffening of the lines of dignity.
But Susie smiled rather wearily at my forlorn little parade of hauteur. Then she looked at the fire.
“It’s hell, isn’t it, being a woman?” she finally observed, unconsciously paraphrasing a much older philosopher.