No, that wasn't a fact, though it could be twisted into looking like one. If he had refrained from urging motherhood upon her, if he'd given her the benefit of his special knowledge, didn't her interest in her career as a singer establish the presumption that it was her wish rather than his that they were following. Had she ever said she'd like to have a baby? Or even hinted?
He pulled himself up. There was no good going over that again.
He bathed and shaved and dressed himself in fresh clothes, operations which had been perforce omitted at the cottage this morning in favor of his departure without arousing Paula. (He'd slept, or rather lain awake, upon the hammock in the veranda.) When he came down-stairs he found Pete's wife already in the kitchen, gave her directions about his breakfast and then from force of habit, thought of his morning paper. The delivery of it had been discontinued, of course, for the months the house was closed, so he walked down to Division Street to get one.
He had got his mind into a fairly quiescent state by then which made the trick it played when he first caught sight of the great stacks of Tribunes and Heralds on the corner news-stand all the more terrifying. It had the force of an hallucination; as if in the head-lines he actually saw the word suicide in thick black letters. And his daughter's name underneath.
He had managed, somehow, to evade that word; to refrain from putting into any words at all the peril Mary had so narrowly escaped, although the fact had hung, undisguised, between him and March during the moment they stared at each other before they went up-stairs together. It avenged that evasion by leaping upon him now. He bought his paper and hurried home with it under his arm, feeling as if it might still contain the news of that tragedy.
Reacting from this irrational panic he tried to discount the whole thing. March hadn't lied, of course, but, being a lover, he had exaggerated. As John sat over his breakfast he got to feeling quite comfortable about this. His mind went back to the breakfast he had had with Mary at Ravinia —breakfast after much such an abominable night as this last had been—the breakfast they had left for that talk under the trees beside the lake. And then his own words came back and stabbed him.
He had been arguing with her his right to extinguish himself if he chose. He had said he had no religion real enough to make a valid denial of that right. It was a question no one else could presume to decide. How much more had he said to that sensitive nerve-drawn child of his? He remembered how white she had gone for a moment, a little later. And he had pretended not to see! Just as he had been pretending, a few minutes back, to doubt the reality of the peril March had saved her from. What a liar he was!
Sentimentality, March had quoted Mary as saying, was the cruelest thing in the world. John stood convicted now of that cruelty toward his daughter. Was he guilty of it, also, toward his wife? Did their quarrel boil down to that?