“Matters not. She didn’t come home for Carey. You can’t make books without copy. Not her sort of book. Any more than you can make bricks without straw. But she didn’t make her bricks from his straw, that I’ll swear.”
“No, she didn’t come home for Carey,” said Anita. “I tell you, that was the day she met him. It’s barely a year ago. She had made her name twice over by then. She was already casting about for her third plot. I think it was that that made her so restless. She’d grown very restless. But she certainly didn’t come home for Carey.”
“Then why?”
“Homesick.”
“That’s absurd.”
“I’m telling you what she said. She insisted on it. She used a queer phrase. She said—‘I longed for home till my lips ached.’”
The lady with Mr. Flood stirred in her shadows.
“She didn’t imagine that. That happens. That is how one longs——” She broke off.
“For home?” he said, with that smile of his that ended at his mouth and left his eyes like chips of quartz.
She answered him slowly, him only—