“Well, Larry, marriage means a good many things to me. It means being kind and making a good home––a real home, not just a place to come to. It means standing by each other, even if you can’t have everything!”
Just for one moment Larry was inclined to end this shilly-shallying by brute determination. He was that type of man. 49 What did not come within the zone of his own experience, did not exist for him except as obstacles to brush aside.
It was a damned bad time, he thought, for Mary-Clare to act up her book stuff. A man, home after a three months’ absence, tired and worn out, could not be expected, at close upon midnight, to enjoy this outrageous nonsense that had been sprung upon him.
He must put an end to it at once. He discarded the cave method. Of course that impulse was purely primitive. It might simplify the whole situation but he discarded it. Mary-Clare’s outbursts were like Noreen’s “dressing up”––and bore about the same relation in Larry’s mind.
“See here,” he said suddenly, fixing his eyes on Mary-Clare––when Larry asserted himself he always glared––“just what in thunder do you mean?”
The simplicity of the question demanded a crude reply.
“I’m not going to have any more children.” Out of the maze of complicated ideals and gropings this question and answer emerged, devastating everything in their path. They meant one, and only one, thing to Larry Rivers.
There were some things that could illume his dark stretches and level Mary-Clare’s vague reachings to a common level. Both Larry and Mary-Clare were conscious now of being face to face with a grave human experience. They stood revealed, man and woman. The big significant things in life are startlingly simple.
The man attacked the grim spectre with conventional and brutal weapons; the woman backed away with a dogged look growing in her eyes.
“Oh! you aren’t, eh?” Larry spoke slowly. “You’ve decided, have you?”