"This," said Ranny, "is the joie de veeve."
Three more months passed.
For Ransome every day brought a going forth and a returning, a mixing with the world, with men and with affairs, the affairs of Woolridge's. His married life had done one thing for him. It taught him to appreciate his life at Woolridge's, and to discern variety where variety had not been too apparent. There was the change from Granville to Woolridge's, and from Woolridge's to Granville. There was the dinner hour when he rose from his desk and went out to an A B C shop with Booty or some other man. Sometimes the other man had ideas, views of life and so forth, that interested Ransome; if he hadn't, at any rate he was a man. That is to say, he didn't sulk or nag or snap at you; or nip the words out of your mouth and twist them; he wasn't perverse; he didn't do things that passed your comprehension, and he let you be. For Ransome the world of men brought respite. Even at home, in that world of women, of one woman, when things (he meant the one woman) were too much for him, menacing his as yet invincible hilarity, he could turn his back on them, and work in the garden or play with the Baby. Or he could leave them for a while and mount his bicycle and ride out into the open country. For Ransome life still had interests and surprises.
For the Baby surprise and interest lurked in the feeblest of its sensations; every day brought, for the Baby, excitement, discovery, and adventure. And then, it had attached itself to Ransome. It behaved as if it had some secret understanding with its father. Its sense of comedy, like Ranny's, seemed imperishable. It would respond explosively to devices so old, so stale, so worn by repetition, that the wonder was they didn't alienate it, or disgust. The rapid approach and withdrawal of Ranny's hand, his face suddenly hidden behind its pinafore and exposed, still more suddenly, with a cry of "Peep-bo!" its own inspired seizing of Ranny's hair, would move it to delirious laughter or silent strangling frenzy. And when Ranny wasn't there, and nobody took any notice of it, it had its own solitary and mysterious ecstasies of mirth.
It was all very well for Ranny and the Baby.
But for Violet it was one interminable, intolerable monotony. Always the same tiresome things to be done for Granville and for the Baby and for Ranny, when she did them; and when she didn't there was nothing to do but to sit still, with no outlook, no interest, no surprise, no possibility of variety and adventure.
Now and then they would leave the Baby at Wandsworth with its grandmother, and Ranny would take her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum. But these bright hours were rare, and when they passed the gloom they had made visible was gloomier. And brooding over it, she suffered a sense of irremediable wrong.
Nothing to look forward to but bedtime; the slow, soft-footed ascent to the room with the walls of love knots and rosebuds, Ranny carrying the Baby. Nothing to look forward to but the dark when the Baby slept and Ranny (who would hang over it till the last minute) couldn't see the Baby any more, the dark when he would turn to her with the old passion and the old caresses.
And even into the darkness and into their passion there had come a difference, subtle, estranging, and profound. Between them there remained that sense of irremediable wrong. In Violet it roused resentment and in Ransome a tender yet austere responsibility. For he blamed himself for it.