“Doesn’t the house feel empty?” she said.
Francis mumbled.
“I’m sure Annette is going to have a baby.”
“M-m-m-m.”
“I thought I was never going to be a grandmother.”
“You always were impatient,” said Francis in an unexpectedly loud voice.
That was criticism, which she could not abide. Francis rued his precipitancy. He was very unhappy about Frederic, but, he asked himself, what could he do? What could he do? There was no doubt that Jessie loved Frederic, but did not that, in itself, the more dangerously expose her to his folly and weak selfishness?
He hardly heard his wife’s words as she went maundering on. In the darkness he prayed that all might be, as he tried to believe, for the best.