He came to the conclusion that they must have been living in a queer atmosphere, to let themselves be ruined by such mental abnormalities. No standards. Or was that the root of the trouble—Cecily’s standards? Cecily’s standards which had seemed when he married her to be so wonderfully beautiful and which had become so irritating, so inflexible, so rigid. They had set her apart from so many people. She had preserved them at such great cost.
Now, with the jazz fever out of his blood, with the cold air on his cheeks, Dick could see how he might have taught Cecily tolerance. She had learned many other things. But it was too late now for that. They had hurt each other too cruelly. Humiliated each other; and he had added a cruel touch of further humiliation on Christmas. At the thought of Christmas Dick always stopped thinking. He couldn’t bear to go on with the picture of himself that he imagined Cecily saw of him, sneaking home on a holiday, a sentimental, desirous, quarrelsome brute.
In a kind of debauch of lonesomeness, he used to think of other things about Cecily—of the way she used to tuck the little baby under her chin like a fiddle—of the way she looked with her hair spread out on her pillow. But it rested him. He would look back and remember little things which had seemed of no consequence, but now were comforting and sweet. She had loved him. He must persuade her to let him do something for the boys—settle something on her.
Then he would go to bed and get up to an immense day’s work.
In late February he ran in to Carrington for a week to straighten out things at the office and fight out some matters which weren’t being given the attention he wanted them to have. He was going back to the mines for another couple of months.
“I want to see the situation through the winter. Next winter I’ll know better how to go about things up there, even if it must be done at longer range.”
“Going to establish the millennium?” asked one of the directors, trying to “kid” Dick a bit.
Dick gave him a queer look.
“There’s no millennium coming for a damned long time yet,” he answered. “But we may save a lot of money and, what’s more, a lot of skins by finding out just what is going on up there.”
They praised his work in giving him greater leeway and full power to do what he thought best in dismissals and appointments.