That attitude can't last any woman long, and Rose, with her wonderfully clever hands, her wits trained—as the wits of persons who had worked for John Galbraith were always trained—not to be told the same thing twice, her pride keeping in sharp focus the determination that Rodney should see that she could be as good a nurse as Miss French—Rose wore off that nervous tenseness over her new job very quickly. Within a week she had a routine established that was noiseless—frictionless.
But do you remember how aghast she was over the forty weeks John Galbraith had talked about as the probable run of The Girl Up-stairs; her consternation over the idea of just going on doing the same thing over and over again, "around and round, like a horse at the end of a pole"? What she would like to do, she had told him, now that this was done, was to begin on something else.
Well, it was with something the same feeling of consternation that, having thrown herself heart and soul into the task of planning and setting in motion a routine for two year-and-a-half-old babies, she found herself straightening up and saying "What next?" And realizing, that as far as this job was concerned, there was no "next." The supreme merit of her care, from now on, would be—barring emergencies—the placid continuation of that routine. There were no heroics about motherhood—save in emergency, once more. It was a question of remembering a hundred trivial details, and executing them in the same way every day. It was a question of doing a thousand little services, not one of which was serious enough to occupy her mind, every one of which was capable of being done almost automatically—but not quite! The whole of the attention was never quite taken, and yet it was never, all the way around the clock, entirely left free. And her love for them, which had become almost as intense and overmastering a thing as her love for her husband, could never be expressed fully, as was her love for him. It would be cruelly unfair, she recognized that, to emotionalize over them—force them.
It was a fine relation. It was, perhaps, the very finest in the world. But as a job, it wasn't so satisfactory. Four-fifths of it, anyway, could be done with better results for the children by a placid, unimaginative, tolerably stupid person, who had no stronger feeling for them than the mild temporary affection they could excite in any one not a monster. And the other fifth of it wasn't strictly a job at all.
On the whole, then, leaving their miraculous hours out of the account—and, being incommensurable, imponderable, they couldn't be included in an inventory—their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to revisit Arcady, to seize a golden day that looked neither toward the past nor toward the future, complete in itself, perfect—was a failure.
It was not until, pretty ruefully, they acknowledged this, tore up their artificial resolution not to look at the future, and deliberately set themselves to the contemplation of a life that would have to take into account complex and baffling considerations, that their honeymoon became a success. It was well along in their month that this happened.
Rose had spent a maddening sort of day, a day that had been all edges, trying not to let herself feel hurt over fantastic secondary meanings which it was possible to attach to some of the things Rodney had said, frying to be cheerful and sensible, and to ignore the patent fact that his cheerfulness was as forced and unnatural a thing as hers. The children—as a rule the best-behaved little things in the world—had been refractory. They'd refused to take their morning nap for some reason or other, and had been fractious ever since. So, after their supper, when they'd finally gone off to sleep, and Rose had rejoined Rodney in the sitting-room, she was in a state where it did not take much to set her off.
It was not much that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical, and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done things like that. If you found him sitting in a chair, you found him reading a book. When he was thinking something out he tramped back and forth, twisted his face up, made gestures! That habit couldn't have changed. It was just that he wasn't being natural with her! Couldn't feel at home with her! Before she knew it, she was crying.
He asked, in consternation, what the matter was. What had happened?
"Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. Really."