“Yes, I am. As for pottering round here, and trying to get up an interest in things I ought to have begun instead of ended in, and setting round reading books that I can't keep my mind on, and if I do, just get madder and madder, I won't. I'm going back to work with my hands the way I've been working the last forty years, and then I guess I'll get my mind out of leading-strings.”
“Henry Whitman, be you crazy?”
“No, but I shall be if I set round this way much longer.”
“You don't need to do a mite of work.”
“You don't suppose it's the money I'm thinking about! It's the work.”
“What will folks say?”
“I don't care what they say.”
“Henry Whitman, I thought I knew you, but I declare it seems as if I have never known you at all,” Sylvia said. She looked at him with her puzzled, troubled eyes, in which tears were gathering. She was still very pale.
A sudden pity for her came over Henry. After all, he ought to try to make his position clear to her. “Sylvia,” he said, “what do you think you would do, after all these years of housekeeping, if you had to stand in a shoe-shop, from morning till night, at a bench cutting leather?”
Sylvia stared at him. “Me?”