“Will you go to bed, now?”
“I don’t need to go to bed now,” she answered, smiling through her tears. “I’ve strength enough for a lifetime.”
“You’re to go to bed at once,” said Jim. “If you don’t, you will lose your job on The Journal. Come, you can lock me out and then go to bed.”
They told Anna about the boy’s safety and Anna characteristically relapsed into a quick account of what she herself had gone through since he had begun to be sick. She admitted that she had given him a piece of mince pie and that he had liked it so well that she had let him have “another sliver.”
“He was pestering me for it.”
Horatia was past reproaches. She turned and went away, around the house with Jim, locking the windows and doors and turning off the lights. Coupled with her relief and happiness was a happiness in doing these domestic things with Jim and a new closeness because they had been through suffering together. At the front door, he took her in his arms.
“I couldn’t have borne it without you, Jim.”
“We can bear anything—together.”
Again that feeling that this might be repeated in their own life together—their own children might go down to the edge of death—suffering might come—but they would have each other. Life could not frighten them.
Then, as if everything had become as hard as possible to test her, and finding her brave under the test, was becoming kinder, the household burdens lightened. Jackie was well—so amazingly well that it was hard to believe that he ever had been sick—Ellen was better and came back to her work and the house slid into order and ease again. And more and more accustomed did Horatia become to the ways of a household and more and more normal did it seem to imagine herself in a household. She absorbed the touch of dogmatism natural to the competent woman who must dogmatize about her household. That was one of the unfortunate results of her adaptability and one bound to have grave consequences. All the things around her were real and true. They were made graver and deeper by the reflection of the things she had learned in the last six months but their truth was not altered. Children were beautiful, homes were beautiful, and love was the most beautiful and basic fact of all. The episode of Grace had become a dulled tragedy and she rarely thought of her previous life in their flat lest she resurrect what had been such an ugly climax to it.