And I had at last become conscious of something that hitherto I had only half consciously noticed—namely, that she spoke of Evie repeatedly as "your wife." Obstinately she refused to use her name. I think that I felt even then our approach to what I have called the shallows of her femininity. Can you wonder at it? Is it so very surprising that, with the tremors of those shut transmitters of her eyes, the whole fantastic and exhausting fabric of my interpretation of her feeling for myself tottered? He has to be a greater painter than Billy Izzard whose fiction can fill the life of a woman already past thirty, whom you have so heaped with cares that her face takes on age as you look at it! Her voice shook as she strove to hide all this from me.
"But you see the disadvantage you have me at," she said. "You know what you really want, though you haven't put it quite plainly yet; but even if I were to try it you wouldn't let me say what I mean."
"Oh, say it, say it: we're in the mess, and it's no good keeping things back."
"No, no—you've no right to expect that of me. I'll do everything else, but I'm only a mortal woman, with limbs and hungers, after all."
"You're a very wondrous one."
"Tch!" The exclamation broke from her as if I had blundered on a nerve with an instrument. "You're making big demands of my wondrousness, Jim!"
I gave a low groan. "Poor woman! Is it more than——"
But she broke out into quite a loud cry.