“That’s right.” She nestled closer to him, and he hated himself for the small irritation with which he always received her intonation of the two words, the first pitched on a higher key than the second. “I like coming out here, where no one can interrupt us.”
“It’s a wonderful place.”
“Because we’re here together, isn’t it?”
“Dear, you mustn’t expect me to say too many pretty things.”
“Of course not,” said the girl simply.
“You’ve said so many, and of course I remember them all. I’m not so silly as to expect you to go on. Whatever you say and do I like.”
“Don’t,” he said with unusual vehemence, “don’t set me up on a pedestal, whatever you do! I’m clay. Poor clay, too.”
“Clay?” She looked bewildered.
A rush of irritable shame was upon him, a nightmare weight as if all that he did at this time was false. It had touched him before, but he had succeeded in arguing with it, for to a man of his self-contained character it was easy to argue that, after so many precautions and limitations, it was impossible he should have given himself away. It was easy to argue, and he was able to bring incontrovertible reasons to support his case. The reasons had not changed. Sylvia was the same: as sweet-tempered, as amenable, as pretty as ever. The same, the same, the same—why, there lay the sting! If in three or four weeks this sameness, this insipidity, was making him sick to death, why, what—oh, God, what would a whole married lifetime do? She had not a thought which branched in a wrong direction, but he said to himself bitterly that he did not believe she owned anything which could be dignified with the name of thought; she only made scrappy little applications of other people’s ideas when they reached her in their simplest forms. His intellect was judging, despising her, scourging him with the belief that he had chosen a fool for his wife, mocking his vanity, his hopes, dropping him into depths of despair. Time, which brings healings for most sorrows, looked his worst enemy. Time—Eternity—and Sylvia!