Carteret [smiling]. No, I don't believe they are. They just love and love their child, that's all.
Rachel. Yes, that's all. And that's everything.
Carteret [smiling]. And that's everything.
[Rachel sitting looking before her—Carteret leaning back in his chair looking up at ceiling; not at her].
Carteret. That night, at Simonstown, that I got your telegram saying the child was born, that you had a daughter—it was so wonderful, so impossible to understand. That night I remember, after I knew, I went for a blow on the quarter deck quite late, before turning in—in the sort of dark it is out there when the sky is deep purple and the huge stars are blazing in it like holes opening into glory—and I kept saying to myself, A child! I have a child—my child! I really believe for a while I was almost mad. It seemed to me that the plash of the sea, the choppy little waves beating against the gangway ladder were answering me, were saying the same thing, too—my child! Life had changed in that hour. And I wondered if I could go on waiting, waiting for the moment when I should be with you both. I didn't tell any of them about it out there. I didn't trust myself. I didn't know what I should say if I began to speak of it.
Rachel [smiling]. You'd have been all over the place.
Carteret [trying to hide his emotion]. I believe I should, for once. Good old Tom! I was with him when he died in the East. He would have been glad to know I had got his little girl out of a scrape.
Rachel. And that you had married her.
Carteret. Well … he would have thought me a bit old for you, perhaps.
Rachel. You're not to say that! You're just the right age.