“I suppose you do, but Matthew doesn’t see Cecily and he misses it when he doesn’t. He says so. He likes to talk to her. I’ve always been jealous of her and rather glad you saw her first.”
“Don’t be foolish, Fliss.”
“As you say. Well, it’s been nice to see you. No, I must pay for my own lunch. It makes our lunching together so definitely respectable.”
It ran through Dick’s mind that afternoon at intervals that perhaps he and Cecily were getting a bit too domestic. He decided to take the matter up with her. There had been a time, immediately after his disappointing war service—a service which had kept him from going overseas because he was found to be immensely useful in training camps on his own side of the ocean—when Dick had felt like plunging into society a bit more deeply than he had ever done since his marriage; when the allurement of light talk and loose manners had been strong for a few months.
But the imminent coming of their third child had been announced and Cecily herself was too thoroughly out of sympathy with moods of lightness to even have him suggest that she join in them. She herself had been willing to make any necessary sacrifice during the war. She had waited, during the year and a half when the United States was at war, to see Dick go at any moment to France and to death. She had maintained herself in a continual state of sacrifice. The evils of the world and the crusading spirit had pressed upon her. That she had not been called upon for personal sacrifice did not mean that she could alter the attitude in which she was ready for sacrifice. And the seriousness of childbearing again had weighed her down. “Yes,” thought Dick, “we’re getting a bit heavy.”
The impression lasted until he went into his house that night and then he felt suddenly absurd. Upstairs he could hear the sounds of the babies being put to bed. Around him everything was orderly and still, waiting for him. It was comfortable and quiet and the sense of possession which so often came over him as he entered his home quite destroyed that vague feeling that he and Cecily weren’t quite getting all they might be getting out of things. And a sense of shame at even this slight disloyalty to all she had done to make him happy put extra devotion into his greeting of her.
She came down the stairs a little abstractedly. In two years she seemed, like Fliss, to have changed little—very pretty, very young still—only where the magnetism of Fliss had increased, Cecily’s had perhaps somewhat diminished. The constant day by day responsibility of caring for her babies had weighted her manner. Her mind was on the business of being a mother and a housekeeper—not on Dick, even when she kissed him.
“They are all quiet now,” she said. “If you must go up, don’t disturb them, will you?”
“No,” he promised. “Did the new housemaid come?”
“Yes, she’s here. I don’t think she’s going to be very good, though.”