“Exactly, then do not complain about my not showing nice feeling, because I don’t make myself a nuisance to Anne.”
Another day I told him just to look, for instance, at Constance’s mother. He said he thought she seemed a very nice old lady. “All right,” I said, “Tom is outside, and he is likely to be open with us to-day, because his mother-in-law is staying for the week-end with Constance—come along.” I dragged him out under the trees where Tom was lying in a hammock, reading. When we had got chairs and explained that we had ordered tea outside to save him the trouble of coming in, I said: “I suppose you can’t stay to dinner if Constance’s mother is with you?”
“Poor girl!” said Tom, “I suppose I had better go and give her a hand.”
“But she is a very nice old lady, isn’t she?” I asked.
“Oh, very,” he agreed flabbily. Then he saw my face, and noticed also Robert’s intelligent, inquiring expression. “What’s the matter with you two?” he asked.
“The fact is, darling,” I explained, “that Robert was a little dissatisfied with me because he thinks I do not take enough part in his household arrangements, so we came out, less to save you the trouble of coming to tea than that you should save me the trouble of explaining to him.”
Tom flung down his book. “I will tell you all about it from beginning to end,” he promised us. “People talk about the mind being a storehouse, but hers is the bottomless pit. And the only things that will go into it are details; if you give her the sort of things that are in most people’s minds they lie about outside the pit and make her uncomfortable. But I get so done up filling her with the stuff, and so does Con. She wants to know every detail of our lives, from the kind of shaving soap I use to whether I put the lights out myself or leave it to the servants. Constance has to tell all hers too. The old lady starves if she doesn’t get it, and no amount of it seems to satisfy her.”
“But, surely, she must know your day pretty well by now,” suggested Robert, taking my hand affectionately.
“You would think so,” said Tom, “but you see you are wrong, because there is just a shade of difference sometimes in what I do every day. For instance, when I go home to-night I shall have to tell her where we all sat this afternoon, and when you came out, and why.” (He tore his hair.) “And what the devil shall I say when she asks what we talked about? I get so giddy with it, you know, that I just keep the scene in my mind and give it her all faithfully. I dare not invent or I should contradict myself.”
Robert apologised to me, and, of course, I said it was nothing; there was no pleasure like setting matters of opinion right. But I returned to Tom for confirmation of my theories of sex.