The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon the air, to impregnate it with some benumbing quality. The husband and wife looked dumbly, almost vacantly at one another, for what appeared a long time.
“I mean”—all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort of fluency as he progressed—“I mean, if you shared things really with me! Oh, I'm not complaining; you mustn't think that. The agreement we made at the start—you've kept your part of it perfectly. You've done better than that: you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy.”
“Oh no,” she interposed, gently. “It is not the fact that it has made me unhappy.”
“Well—discontented, then,” he resumed, without pause. “Here we are. We do the thing we want to do—we make the kind of home for ourselves that we've agreed we would like—and then it turns out that somehow it doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it. I suppose, if the truth were known, I'm by way of being tired of it too. Well, if you look at it, that fact is the most important thing in the world for both of us. It's the one thing that we ought to be most anxious to discuss, and examine frankly in all its bearings—in order to see if we can't better it—but that's precisely the thing that doesn't get talked about between us. You would never have told me that you were unhappy——”
“You use the word again,” she reminded him, a wan smile softening her protest.
Thorpe stood up, and took a slow step toward the chair. He held her glance with his own, as he stood then, his head bent, gravely regarding her.
“Do you tell me that you are happy?” he asked, with sober directness.
She fluttered her hands in a little restrained gesture of comment. “You consider only the extremes,” she told him. “Between black and white there are so many colours and shades and half-tones! The whole spectrum, in fact. Hardly anybody, I should think, gets over the edge into the true black or the true white. There are always tints, modifications. People are always inside the colour-scheme, so to speak. The worst that can be said of me is that I may be in the blues—in the light-blues—but it is fair to remember that they photograph white.”
Though there was an impulse within him to resent this as trifling, he resisted it, and judicially considered her allegory. “That is to say”—he began hesitatingly.
“To the observer I am happy. To myself I am not unhappy.”