She shook her head.
“That’s a man’s feeling. I can’t share it.”
“But think—all the attention you would have to give to a child, all the thoughts you would fasten on it, all the anxieties you’d have about it!”
“Well?”
“One only has a certain amount of time. You’d have to take away a good deal, a great deal, of the time you can now give to me. Oh, it sounds too beastly, I know! Perhaps I scarcely mean it! But surely you can see how a man who loves a woman very much might, without being the least bit unnatural, think, ‘I’d like to keep every bit of her for myself. I’d like to have her all to myself!’ I dare say this feeling will pass. Remember, Rose, we’re only just married, and we’re in Greece, right away from every one. Don’t think me morbidly jealous, or a beast. I’m not. I expect lots of men have felt as I do, perhaps even till the first child came.”
“Ah, then it would be all right,” she said. “The natural things, the things nature intends, are always all right.”
“How blessedly sane and central you are!”
“If we had a child—Dion, you must believe me!—we should be drawn ever so much nearer together by it. If we ever do have one, we shall look back on this time—you will—and think ‘We were much farther apart then than we are now.’”
“I don’t like to hear you say that,” he said gravely, almost with pain.
Could a woman like Rosamund be driven by an instinct blindly? She was such a perfect type of womanhood. It would be almost a tragedy if she—such a woman—died childless. Perhaps instinct had obscurely warned her of that, had taught her where to look for a mate. He, Dion, had always lived purely. That day she had acknowledged that she had divined it. Was that, perhaps, her real, her instinctive reason for marrying him? But a man wants to be married for one thing only, because the woman longs for him. And Dion was just an ordinary man with very strong feelings.