"The spring is so early this year," she remarked once, with her gaze on the rosy billows of an orchard. "The peach trees have almost finished blooming."
Then, as he made no answer except to flick at John Henry's bay mare with his whip, she asked daringly, "Are you writing again, Oliver?"
A frown darkened his forehead, and she saw the muscles about his mouth twitch as though he were irritated. For all his failure and his bitterness, he did not look a day older, she thought, than when she had first seen him driving down High Street in that unforgettable May. He was still as ardent, still as capable of inspiring first love in the imagination of a girl. The light and the perfume of that enchanted spring seemed suddenly to envelop her, and moved by a yearning to recapture them for an instant, she drew closer to him, and slipped her hand through his arm.
"Oh, I'm trying my luck with some trash. Nothing but trash has any chance of going in this damned business."
"You mean it's different from your others? It's less serious?"
"Less serious? Well, I should say so. It's the sort of ice-cream soda-water the public wants. But if I can get it put on, it ought to run, and a play that runs is obliged to make money. I doubt if there's anything much better than money, when it comes to that."
"You used to say it didn't matter."
"Did I? Well, I was a fool and I've learned better. These last few years have taught me that nothing else on earth matters much."
This was so different from what that other Oliver—the Oliver of her first love—might have said, that involuntarily her clasp on his arm tightened. The change in him, so gradual at first that her mind, unused to subtleties, had hardly grasped it, was beginning to frighten her.
"You have such burdens, dear," she said, and he noticed that her voice had acquired the toneless sweetness of her mother's. "I've tried to be as saving as I could, but the children have been sick so much that it seems sometimes as if we should never get out of debt. I am trying now to pay off the bills I was obliged to make while Harry was ill in October. If I could only get perfectly strong, we might let Marthy go, now that Jenny is getting so big."