Her face clouded over.
"Oh, Roger, you don't understand! I must do it. I couldn't live without it. It fills my life."
His expression softened. He reached out his arm again and drew her back to his side, but this time with a strange, unwonted tenderness.
"I suppose it does," he conceded. "But some day, darling, after we're married, I hope there'll be something—someone—else to fill your life. And when that time comes,—why, the music will take second place."
Nan flushed scarlet and wriggled irritably in his embrace.
"Oh, Roger, do try to understand! As if . . . having a child . . . would make any difference. A baby's a baby, and music's music—the one can't take the place of the other."
Roger looked a trifle taken aback. He held old-fashioned views and rather thought that all women regarded motherhood as a duty and privilege of existence. And, inside himself, he had never doubted that if this great happiness were ever granted to Nan, she would lose all those funny, unaccountable ways of hers—which alternately bewildered and annoyed him—and turn into a nice, normal woman like ninety-nine per cent. of the other women of his somewhat limited acquaintance.
Man has an odd trick of falling in love with the last kind of woman you would expect him to, the very antithesis of the ideal he has previously formulated to himself, and then of expecting her, after matrimony, suddenly to change her whole individuality—the very individuality which attracted him in the first instance—and conform to his preconceived notions of what a wife ought to he.
It is illogical, of course, with that gloriously pig-headed illogicalness not infrequently to be found in the supposedly logical sex, and it would be laughable were it not that it so often ends in tragedy.
So that Roger was quite genuinely dumbfounded at Nan's heterodox pronouncement on the relative values of music and babies.