Presently he spoke, but did not lift his head. "Mother, I like being here...."
She was not perturbed because he then fell silent. It was natural enough that he should be shy of speaking of his other love.
But he continued: "Mother, do you know why I would always have stuck to my people, no matter how they'd treated me? I wonder if you'll think I'm mad? I'd have stuck to them in any case—because they've got the works on Kerith Island, and I've always wanted to work there. Think of it! I shall be able to sleep here at night and go out in the morning to a place I've seen all my life out of these windows. And all day long I'll be able to put my head out of my lab. door and look along the hill to our tree-tops. Mother, I do love this house," he said earnestly, raising his head and looking round the kitchen as if even it were dear to him, though he could not have been in it more than once or twice before. "It's a queer thing, but though you've altered this completely from what it was when I was a boy, it still seems the oldest and most familiar thing in the world. And though it's really rather exposed as houses go, hanging up here over the marshes, I feel when I come back to it as if I were creeping down into some hiding-place, into some warm, closed place where nothing horrible could ever find me. Do you feel like that, mother?"
She nodded. "I might hate this house, considering all that's happened here. But I, too ..." She spoke in the slightly disagreeable tone that a reticent nature assumes when it is obliged to confess to strong feeling. "Yes, I love it."
They looked solemnly into the crepitant blaze of the new fire. He grasped her hand; but suddenly released it and asked querulously, as if he had remembered certain tedious obligations: "And Ellen, does she like the house?"
She was appalled, "Yes, yes! I think so," she stammered.
"Good," he said curtly, and buried his head in her lap again.
For as long as possible she endured her dismay; then, bending forward and trying to twist his face round so that she could read it, she asked unsteadily, "Richard, you do love Ellen, don't you?"
He sat up and met her eyes. "Of course I do. Have you been thirty-six hours with her without seeing that I must? She—she's a lamp with a double burner. There's her beauty, and her dear, funny, young little soul. It's good to have someone that one can worship and befriend at the same time. Yes, we're going to be quite happy." His eyes slid away from hers evasively, then hardened and resolved to be honest, and returned again. "Mother, I tell you this is the end." After that his honesty faltered. He chose to take it that his mother was looking so fixedly at him because she had not understood the meaning of his words, so he repeated soberly, "I tell you, this is the end. The end of love making for me. I shall never love any other woman but Ellen as long as I live." And he turned to the fire, the set of his shoulders confessing what his lips would not—that though he loved Ellen, though he wanted Ellen, there was something imperfect in the condition of his love which made him leaden and uneager.
"That's right, that's right; you must be good to her," Marion murmured, and stroked his hair. "I don't think you could have done better than your Ellen if you'd searched the whole world," she said timidly, trying to give him a cue for praise of his love. "It's such astonishing luck to find a girl whose sense will be as much solid good to you as a fortune in the bank and who looks as pretty as a rose-tree at the same time."