“What did y’expect? Making me so fond of you?”
He said lamely:
“I—I hadn’t thought of it.”
She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:
“I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was.”
René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill—commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be—must it not?—always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.
It was no revulsion, no withering of his feeling for her; rather it was that the brutal fact had a burning quality to peel away the trimmings from what he felt.
He found himself groping back in his life before Ann came into it. Nothing quite the same had happened to him before. The perishing of his young desire had left him in a whirling excitement which contained less torture than this obsession of cold realization. Bereft now of all that had made his life good and pleasant and amusing, he could only appreciate Ann and the experience that lay before her, appreciate, but not understand. That was too horrible. She had been so dear to him; such a good, kind, true, brave little soul. The resentment that he could not altogether escape he visited on Rita, as Ann had from the first visited hers on Kilner.
Why should Kilner on the one hand, and Rita on the other, draw them apart? Why had they created nothing that could be shared outside themselves? Why should that which they had created destroy that which they had valued in their life together? Why—and he came firmly back to his real obsession—why should they have so isolated themselves that the natural consequence of their love, if love it were, should be an intrusion, a shock greater than they could bear?
He listened again. Ann’s breathing seemed to tell that she was asleep. He crept in to her. She was awake. After what seemed an age, she said in a dry, weary voice: