“Sweetheart, if you could know how they suffer—when you see—”
She composed herself to listen, knowing how it would be. He would hold her close like this and tighter and tighter his arms would feel as he explained and related. Then, in his excitement, he would loose her and leave her, gently, while he paced up and down the room and forgot the tenants in the next room and herself and everything in his impassioned oratory.
So he was. That was Gregory. When he put her down she turned on the light and picked up her sewing. It was not that she did not listen willingly. She did. If she could not kindle in his flame she was warmed in the glow of it. She too had come to care. Perhaps when they reached Ireland and she saw for herself she would kindle too—she rather hoped so.
He stopped talking and his mind, relaxed, shot back to her.
“Do you feel well to-night, darling?”
“Of course. I’m the most indomitably healthy person you ever knew. I can’t help it.”
“You’re so sweetly healthy that I keep forgetting to take care of you.”
She tossed the blouse from her restlessly and stretched her long arms back of her head to make a cushion.
“It doesn’t bother me when you forget,” she told him. “I’m very glad that it doesn’t, too. I’m glad I haven’t begun marriage by learning habits of dependency. I think we’re rather lucky, Greg. Being us, as we are, with a two day wedding trip and a crowning episode of typhoid and now a baby and an Irish question ahead of us, we’ve learned how to stand alone. Mind our own business instead of crowding into each other’s, you know.”
He did not know. A great deal of modern difficulty and problem making had slipped by him. “You are an obscure young person,” he told her, “and most divinely beautiful. I am going to get Francis Hart to paint you—like that, with your head thrown back. I want a hundred paintings of you just to compare with you, so that I can show that no painting can be as lovely as you are.”