‘Catherine, what is it? What has come between us?’ he asked, his eyes hurt and indignant,—when Catherine had asked this sort of question, as she had on first noticing a different quality in his love-making, he had been impatient and bored, and thought in his heart ‘How like all women,’ but of course he didn’t remember this.
‘Oh Chris, why are you so silly?’ she answered, laughing and pushing him away. ‘Don’t you feel how hot it is, and how much nicer not to be too close together? Let us be sanitary.’
Sanitary? That was a pleasant way of putting it. She was going back to what she used to be at first, when he had such difficulty in getting hold of her at all,—going back into just being an intelligent little stand-offish thing, independent, and determined to have nothing to do with him. How he had worshipped her in those days of her unattainableness. Her relapse now into what threatened to become unattainableness all over again didn’t make him worship her, because that had been the kind of worship that never returns, but it lit his love up again, while at the same time filling him with a fury of possessiveness. A thwarted possessiveness, however; she evaded him more and more.
‘I can’t go to Scotland and leave you. Damn golf. I simply can’t,’ he said at last.
And she, as cool as a little cucumber and as bright as a gay little button—the comparisons were his—told him he simply had to, and that when he came back he would find they were going to be happier than ever.
‘You’ll love me more than ever,’ she said laughing, for though the treatment was extraordinarily exhausting her spirits those days were bright with faith.
‘Rot. Nobody could love you more than I do now, so what’s the good of talking like that? Catherine, what has happened to you? Tell me.’
And there he was, just as he used to be, on the floor at her feet, his arms clasping her knees, his head on her lap.
All this made Catherine very happy. She began to see benefits in the treatment other than the ones Dr. Sanguesa had guaranteed.