The curtains opened like lips and made a whispering noise. Then Winnie could see the wet bronze roof opposite shining blankly against the faint bright sky.
The room was crowded with the atmosphere of two people who have quarreled. They were oppressed by their consciousness of each other. Through the darkness of his shut lids Laurence, only feigning sleep, tried to ascend above the close room and his almost intolerable awareness of Winnie's presence.
She had seen his lids flutter. Tired and sweet, she regarded him mercilessly. She could see how tense the lines of his body were under the couch cover he had drawn up over his feet. His lids, pressed tight together, twitched a little.
"Laurie!"
With a helpless feeling, he opened his eyes.
Winnie's heart beat combatively, triumphantly. "I've been lying here looking at you," she said, her plaintive pout begging him to infer everything. "Bobby's still asleep."
Bobby lay in his little bed relaxed like a drowned child. His lips were pale. His face damp with the heat. His shock of blonde hair fell back on the pillow away from his head. Winnie, beside her big baby, abandoned herself to a sense of dependence which she felt him to justify.
"Yes? I must have slept very hard." In an effort to hide his surprise Laurence responded quickly to her overture. He sat up, smiling elaborately, and began rubbing his eyes.
Winnie would not let him escape through such casualness. "Are you still angry with me, Laurie?" She lifted herself among the pillows and rested on one elbow. There was a terrible youngness about her soft, hungrily uplifted face, her thin neck, the collar bones showing below her white throat. Her eagerness was too vivid. He was conscious of her rapacious youth. It made him tired. Youth demanding of him life and more life. Winnie was ill, but there was no rest for them even in her pain. He felt old and afraid of her, as though he would never be able to get up from the couch.
"Angry with you? Was I angry with you?" He covered his eyes. His lips, smiling below his fingers, were deprecating. He stood up slowly and lifted his trousers from a chair. He felt ridiculous to himself putting them on.