Dodo suddenly became afraid that she was putting too much energy into her renunciation of energy, and gave a long, tired sigh.
"Think of Edith," she said. "How awful to have that consuming fire of energy. The moment the war was over she threw her typewriter out of the window and narrowly missed her scullery-maid in the area. She had locked up her piano, you know, for the period of the war, and of course she had lost the key, and so she broke it open with a poker, and sat down on the middle of the keys in order to hear it talk again. She has gone straight back to her old life, and oh, the relief of knowing that you don't want me to. I couldn't possibly have done it without you to whip me on, and thank God, you dropped your whip. Jack, I thought you would expect me to begin again, and would be disappointed if I didn't. So, like a good wife, I resigned myself to be spurred and whipped, just telling you that you would have to do that. But the joy of knowing that you want to be tranquil, too! Don't let us go up to town to-morrow, or next week, or until we feel inclined."
Dodo ran over what she had said in her mind, and thought it covered the ground. She had fully explained why she had told Jack that he mustn't be a snowdrop, and all that sort of thing. She was convinced of her wisdom when he put up his feet on a chair, and showed no sign of questioning her sincerity.
"We've all changed," he said. "We don't want any more excitements. At least you and I don't. Edith's a volcano, and till now, I always thought you were."
Dodo made a very good pretence at a yawn, and stifled it.
"I remember talking to Edith just before the war," she said. "I told her that a cataclysm was wanted to change my nature. I said that if you lost every penny you had, and that I had to play a hurdy-gurdy down Piccadilly, I should still keep the whole of my enjoyment and vitality, and so I should. Well, the cataclysm has come, and though it has ended in victory, it has done its work as far as I am concerned. I've played my part, and I've made my bow, and shall retire gracefully. I don't want to begin again. I'm old, I'm tired, and my only reason for wishing to appear young and fresh was that you would expect me to. You are an angel."
Dodo's tongue, it may be stated, was not blistered by the enunciation of these amazing assertions. She was not in the least an habitual liar, but sometimes it became necessary to wander remarkably far from the truth for the good of another, and when she engaged in these wanderings, she called the process not lying, but diplomacy. She had made up her mind instantly that it would never do for Jack to resign himself to inaction for the rest of his life and with extraordinary quickness had guessed that the best way of starting him again was not to push or shove him into unwelcome activities, but cordially to agree with him, and profess the same desire for a reposeful existence herself. She regarded it as quite certain that he would not acquiesce long in her abandoning the activities of life, but would surely exert himself to stimulate her interests again. For himself he was an admirable loafer, and had just that spice of obstinacy about him which might make him persist in a lazy existence, if she tried to shake him out of it, but he would be first astonished and soon anxious if she did the same thing, and would exert himself to stimulate her, finding it disconcerting and even alarming if she sank into the tranquil apathy which just now she had asserted was so suitable to her age and inclinations. This Machiavellian plan then, far from being a roundabout and oblique procedure, seemed, on reflection, to be the most direct route to her goal. Left to himself he might loaf almost indefinitely, but a precisely similar course on her part, would certainly make him rouse himself in order to spur her flagging faculties. And all the time, it was she who was spurring him.
She proceeded to clothe this skeleton of diplomacy with flesh.
"I always used to wonder how this particular moment would come to me," she said, "and though I always used to say I would welcome it, I was secretly rather terrified of it. I thought it would be rather a ghastly sort of wrench, but instead of being a wrench it has been the most heavenly relaxation. I had a warning you see, and I had a taste of it, when I collapsed and went off alone to Truscombe; and how delicious it is, darling, that your resignation, so to speak, has coincided with mine. I thought perhaps that you would preserve your energy longer than I, and that I should have to follow, faint but pursuing, or that you would fail first, and would have to drag along after me. But the way it has happened makes it all absolutely divine. I might have guessed it perhaps. We've utterly grown into one, Jack; I've known that so many years, dear, and this is only one more instance out of a thousand. Just the same thing happened to Mr. and Mrs. Browning——"
"Who?" asked Jack.