“But this morning you think differently.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because those are not your real thoughts—they’re the dark, exaggerated ones that come when a person lies awake at night. It’s as if, because you couldn’t see your surroundings, you were in another sort of world where the proportions are different. You couldn’t do that to your wife. You couldn’t treat her that way. You say in many ways she’s been a good wife. It isn’t she that’s stopped caring, or finds her life with you disagreeable.”
“Then, am I to suffer this way for ever—see my life ruined for a fault man after man commits and goes scott free?”
“Your life isn’t ruined. Things don’t last at such a pressure. Something will change it. By and by, you’ll look back on this and it’ll seem hundreds of miles away and you’ll wonder that you were so discouraged and hopeless.”
“Yes,” he said bitterly, “maybe when I’m fifty. It’s a long time between then and now, a long time to be patient.”
Manlike, he was wounded that the woman of his heart should not side with him in everything, even against his own conscience. Had Rose been something closer to him, a sister, a wife, this would have been one of the occasions on which he would have found fault with her and accused her of disloyalty.
“I thought you’d understand,” he said, “I thought you’d see how impossible it is. You make me feel that I’m a whining coward who has come yelping round like a kicked dog for sympathy.”
“I care so much that I do more than sympathize,” she said in a low voice.
This time he did not answer, feeling ashamed at his petulance.