"Yes. I've had an interesting day at the laboratory. Even the commercial side of science has its diversions."
On the hearth the delicate drifting ash took a lilac tinge from some fallen bits of stick in which a crimson glow trembled like a diffused respiration. The room was strange with firelight. Bronze flames burst suddenly from the logs in torrents of rushing silk.
Laurence began to tell about the experiment in anaphylaxis which he had been making in the laboratory that he had charge of at a medical manufacturing establishment. He put the tips of his fingers together while his elbows rested on the arms of his chair. His heavy distinguished face was brown-red from the fire. The gray hair on his temples was animate as with a life unrelated to him. In his ungainly repose there was a dignity of acceptance which Julia recognized, though she could not state it.
Julia felt annihilated by his trust. When he talked on, unaware of her secret misery, it was as though he had willed her out of being. She and her pain had ceased to be.
She had a vision of herself in Dudley's arms. That person in Dudley's arms was alive. She was conscious of herself and Laurence as a double deadness on either side of the living unrelated vision. Then it passed and there was nothing but Laurie's dead voice.
After dinner, while Julia was hearing Bobby's lessons downstairs, Laurence went up to her sitting room to rest and wait for her. He sat down by the Adams desk. The glow from the blue pottery lamp with its orange shade shone along his thick gray-sprinkled hair and lighted one side of his strongly lined face, his deep-set eyes with their crinkled lids, his large well-shaped nose with its bitter nostrils, and his rather small mouth with its hard-sweet expression.
When he heard Julia's step he lifted his head and glanced expectantly toward the door.
Julia's hair was in a loose knot against her neck. She was dressed in a long plain smock of a curious green. Laurence wondered what genius had taught her to select her clothes. While his first wife was alive he despised the mere vainness of dress, but since marrying Julia he had come to feel that clothes provided the art of individualization. It was marvelous that a woman who had previously expended most of her industry as a laboratory assistant had lost none of the knack of enhancing her feminine attributes.
"Bobby has the most indefatigable determination to have his own way. He hasn't any respect for our educational system. I felt he simply must finish his history before he succumbed to the charms of Jack Wilson's new motor cycle."