She hesitated. There was something in her husband's personality that sometimes lay upon her like an embargo. She was conscious of this embargo now. But her nervous irritation made her determined to defy it.
"Claudie," she went on, "you don't know, you can't know, how much I care for your work. It's part of you. It is you. You promised me once you would let me be in the secret. Don't you remember?"
"Did I? When?"
"The day after our party when you were going to begin work again. And now it's nearly two months."
She stopped. He was silent. A flame burst out of a log in the grate and lit up strongly one half of his face. She thought it looked stern, almost fierce, and very foreign. Many Cornish people have Spanish blood in them, she remembered. That foreign look made her feel for a moment almost as if she were sitting with a stranger.
"Nearly two months," she repeated in a more tentative voice.
"Is it?"
"Yes. Don't you think I've been very patient?"
"But, surely—surely—why should you want to know?"
"I do want. Your work is your life. I want it to be mine, too."