She stood looking at him, as if she expected him to speak first. But he didn’t know what to say to her, with that doubt in his mind. Braced by the stern discipline which he felt already had made him so much more a man than he had ever been in his life, he had come home fully prepared to make a fresh start. In spite of her embittered temper, he had not lost quite all his affection for her. He was the kind of man who craves for affection; absence and hardship had made him realize that. He had looked forward to this homecoming, not merely as a relief from the grind of military routine, which galled him at times so that he could hardly bear it, but as an assertion of the manhood, of the husbandhood, that had long been overdue.
“Evenin’, Melia,” he said at last.
“Evenin’, Bill,” as she spoke she dropped her eyes.
“Happy Christmas to you.” Somehow his voice sounded much deeper than ever before.
“Same to you. Bill.” There was almost a softness in the fall of the words that took his mind a long way back.
“How goes it?” Her reception was thawing him a little in spite of himself, but he hesitated about taking off his overcoat. If this fair seeming was intended to mask a blow there was only one way to meet it. There was a pause and then he took the plunge. “Business good?” He held himself ready for the consequences.
“Pretty fair.” The tone told nothing.
“Seems to be that,” he said mordantly. “Had a coat o’ paint, I see, outside.” He steeled himself again. “Had a new window put in an’ all.”
She nodded.
“How did you manage it?” Again the plunge.