He ceased to take an interest in himself at all. His mind settled into a hopeless groove of dogged, disinterested work. To see him pick up a book and lay it aside was a gesture that came to hold a veritable sense of tragedy for her. To watch the effect of a fine play upon him was pathetic. While its beauty filled him with happiness, he dared not allow himself to be lifted too far into that rarified atmosphere. He ventured no opinions about any of the hundreds of stimulating personalities who were coming up on the horizon of culture everywhere. Poetry he spoke of with whimsical condescension, even with contempt. It seemed to him an impudent excrescence, a meaningless dream that had no right to existence in a life of reality.
All this came more swiftly than she knew, occupied as she was with the absorbing bit of life under her care. In three years she thought she scarcely knew Miles. The poems he had shown her that night before the baby’s coming were often in her hands, though she dared not mention them to him. They were as fine as they had been then. Could this plodding man—who loved her still with a desperate, clinging love, a love, as it seemed, that was the breath of his life—be the same man who had written them? And was it possible that he must stop that divine occupation for no other reason than that three people had to live? The future seems short when life is meaningless and tiresome, and we become seized with a fierce impatience. Moira fought against a feeling that they were old and life was declining to its end....
An ominous fact was apparent. In spite of Harlindew’s devotion to work at the office he was achieving very little. He had reached a certain point and come to a standstill. His salary, large according to the ideas with which he had begun, was a dwindling insufficiency when it came to paying their bills. He was beginning to be afraid that he might never go farther. She remembered now a saying that Barcroft had repeated to her: “Push may start behind, but it’s got brains beat all hollow in the end.” He was referring to the kind of brains Miles had, theoretic and literary. Miles himself tried to explain his predicament in words of much the same import. There was a “point of saturation,” he said, in salaries and advancement, unless you “got outside and went after the business.” Apparently that was what he could not do.
At the same time, an incredible number of new expenses, roundly chargeable to the item named “baby” had absorbed all their early savings except a few hundred dollars, which she jealously kept—not so much in fear of an emergency, as with the hope that it might be the magic key to open the door to some way out of their life. But she went into this treasure to buy Miles decent business suits. They were both behind in similar comforts and vanities.
Harlindew seemed to resent any invasion of his evenings, to prefer to sit with her and his thoughts. Yet in reality he was full of an enormous restlessness to which he dared not surrender. The office needed all his energy; he could not spend it. So he thought.... Moira would take the bored man out whenever her maid would stay, trying to revive the spirit of their old comradeship. It came to life only in rare flashes.
Her twenty-eighth year passed. She found herself with more freedom on her hands now, and she obtained work from Elsie Jennings which brought in a few dollars a week. She was not sure which feeling was uppermost in Miles, his pleasure at seeing the money or his disgust at finding her painting silly gift cards. Her painting, the fact that she had always kept it up to some extent, was his consolation, a vicarious substitute for his own emptiness.... But the money made them more comfortable.
Then she discovered that she was going to have another baby. He took the announcement casually, even with a joke.
“By Jove, my dear,” he said, “I’m succeeding in something, anyway.”
He sat down and chuckled to himself. Three things had struck him as very funny. One was that he had never in his life pictured himself as a prolific father—like his own father; another was that he would be thirty-seven that week—and the third that he had come home to tell Moira his salary had been cut.
She dropped quickly, beseechingly beside him, disliking the sound of his laugh.