He was appalled. Never before had he known Helen to talk like this. Why was she doing it? Did she knew what was in his mind? Was she deliberately torturing him?
“Everything would have been so different if they had lived,” she went on, as if she had actually lost these children, “your life and mine. They would have changed us, our ways and our hopes. We should have built the house we planned—for them,” turning to him with a dim smile.
“I suppose so,” he said, obliged to answer this look; “but you know I have never regretted that we have no children.”
“At first you wanted them,” she reminded him.
“But not now. It is better as it is,” he returned moodily.
“No; not for me; not for either of us,” she sighed.
For the first time in her life she saw tears in his eyes.
“For them?” she asked putting out her hand to him.
“No, for you,” he answered, drawing back from this hand.
She noticed that. Her attitude toward him was one of submission. She did not ask herself now why he shrank from her touch. She knew nothing about the psychology of passion, its strange and merciless revulsions.