Dick smoked thoughtfully. “Queer how hard I am about that mess. I feel as if I’d been let in for something and then let down. I wanted to do my best for the family, but I had to have a little mental relaxation. I couldn’t merge with Cecily absolutely and she wouldn’t take anything else. She wouldn’t expand at all. She’s right in her point of view, of course, but that very rightness gradually killed all tenderness in me. It was so exclusive. It seemed to me sometimes as if I was shut up in a room which was too orderly for comfort.”
He stopped from sheer embarrassment and added one sentence that meant more than all the rest.
“I got so I couldn’t laugh naturally.”
“Neither of you can laugh much just now. But you’ll get over that.”
“The hell of it is,” said Dick, “in feeling that you’ve married a girl and she’s got a bunch of babies and then you can’t put it across. I wrecked her chances of getting you for a husband for example, and now she’s stranded.”
“She’s got the children.”
“I know. I know.”
“Well, don’t get hard, old man, and you’ll be able to see it through, I’m sure. Think straight on it if you can. I tell you, if you’d seen Cecily the other night mention your name——”
Dick sprang up. “Let’s cut it out, Mat. There are some things I don’t think about these days. If I did I’d run back to Cecily to-morrow. And I’m telling you that that wouldn’t help. We’d have a wonderful time—for a little while—but after that it would be the same old story over again with the same old conclusion, if not a more tragic one.”
They got their supper in the little cabin and drove back to town in the moonlight, each drawing into his own thoughts. At Matthew’s house Fliss hailed them with delight, but Dick stopped only for a few minutes and then went back to the club.