"That's because it's so simple and so—so dear. You know where you are with husbands."
"You mean you know you're not anywhere."
"Oh," she said, throwing back her head and facing him courageously, "how you don't realise! And anyhow," she added, "if that were true it would be a very placid and restful state to be in."
"Negation. Death. Do you find it placid and restful with me?"
"No," she said quickly.
He put down his brushes and stared at her. "What a mercy!" he said. "What a mercy! I was beginning to be afraid you did."
By the end of the third week an odd thing had happened. He was no nearer piercing through her outer husk to any emotions she might possess than before, but she, astonishingly, had pierced through his.
The outer husk of Ingram at this time and for some years previously was a desire at all costs to dodge boredom, to get tight hold of anything that promised to excite him, squeeze it with diligence till the last drop of entertainment had been extracted, and then let it go again considerably crumpled. It was the kind of husk that causes divergences of opinion with one's wife. And behind it sat, wrapped in flame, the thing that was with him untouchably first, his work. He did not know how or why, but in that third week Ingeborg got through this husk and became mixed up in a curious inextricable way with the flaming holy thing inside.
High above, immeasurably above, any interest he had ever felt in women was his work. The divers love-makings with which his past bristled as an ancient churchyard bristles with battered tombstones, had all been conducted as it were on his doorstep. He came out to the lady, the lady destined so soon to be a tombstone, often with passion, sometimes with illusions, and always with immense goodwill to believe that here was the real thing at last, but she never came in. She might and did catch cold there for anything he cared, she should never cross the threshold and start interfering, delaying, coming between. In the end she got left out there alone, along with the scraper, feeling chilly.
And here was Ingeborg through the door, and not interfering, not delaying, but positively furthering.