“But you must work. You never say anything.”
“Then I must work alone.”
“Why must you?”
“Because I can’t work any other way.”
“What is it disturbs you? I won’t do it if you’ll tell me.”
“I can’t tell you. It’s just having you there.”
“Then you— Then you— Oh, well! There’s nothing more to say if you feel like that about me.”
“Linda, don’t be silly. It isn’t about you.”
She had already fluttered out of the room and closed the door very slowly, so that its movement was the most eloquent reproach.
Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married: