"I've been thinking about it for months. I spoke about it in the fall——" He stopped suddenly, and Catherine saw the phantom that he had evoked: his own voice, harsh, "I think I'll take that Buxton offer, just to get you out of town," and her own answer, thrown back as she fled, "You'd have to be sure I would go!"
"I can't decide it alone," he went on hastily. "I'm just trying to show you how it looks to me."
"But you have decided." Her effort to keep her voice steady flattened all its intonations. "Decided that it is much the best thing for your career, much the best for the children."
"I can't drag you off unless you wish to go. I hoped you would like it, too. It—well, it is something of an honor, you know. The way they keep after me. There's a large appropriation for a laboratory. I'd have very little teaching. They seem to have some idea of a creative department."
Catherine was silent. There was something shaking and ludicrous, in the way that courageous light of afternoon had been snuffed out. Why, she had thought she stood at last in a clear road, where she could be sure of direction, and here she was only at the core of the labyrinth again, knocked blindly into an angle of blind wall.
"Catherine!" he cried out against her silence. "If it wasn't for this damned idea of yours, you'd care what happened to me!"
Whirling about in the lane of her labyrinth, shutting her eyes to its maze. "I do care, Charles. That's the trouble."
"After all, it's not just me. It's the children and you, isn't it?" He fiddled with the blotter, shoved it along the desk. "I think it will be infinitely better for you, too." His chin was obdurate. "New York is no place. Overstimulates you. At a place like Buxton, life is more normal. There's a woman's Faculty Club," he added, triumphantly.
Catherine laughed.