It was not until she heard the long shuddering sigh he drew at that, and felt him go limp under her, that she realized how genuine his fear had been—the perfectly preposterous fear that if their new experiment didn't come up to her anticipation she'd tell him so, and leave him once more. This time for good.
It was a good while before they took up a rational discussion again, but at last she said:
"It will take working out, though. We've been shirking that. Hadn't we better begin?"
He assented. "Only, you'll have to get up," he said, "and sit down somewhere else. Out of reach."
She smiled as she obeyed him. "It's hard for a woman to remember," she said, "that a man can't think about other things when he's making love, and can't think about the person he's in love with when he's doing other things. Because, that's about the easiest thing a woman does."
She saw by the expression that went over his face that her remark had chilled him a little. He didn't like to think of her as "a woman," nor as of his relation to her as accounted for by the fact that he was "a man." He'd generalize fast enough about the world at large, but it would always be hard for him to include her and himself in his generalizations.
"Well," he said when he'd got his pipe alight, "it's the first question I asked you after—after I got my eyes open: What are we going to do?"
"I told Alice Perosini," she said, "the day before we left to come up here, that I'd come back in a month, and that I'd stay until I'd finished all the work that we were contracted for. I felt I had to do that. It would have been so beastly unfair not to. You understand, don't you?"
"Of course," he said. "You couldn't consider anything else. But then what?"
"Then," she said after a silence, "then, if it's what you want me to do, Roddy, I'll come back to Chicago—for good."