Ruth knew that most of Carl's life had been devoted to things quite outside her own sphere of action, but she had known it without feeling it. His talk with Martin showed her how sufficient his life had been without her. She began to worry lest he go back to aviation.
So began their serious quarrels; there were not many of them, and they were forgotten out of existence in a day or two; but there were at least three pitched battles during which both of them believed that "this ended everything." They quarreled always about the one thing which had intimidated them before—the need of quarreling; though apropos of this every detail of life came up: Ruth's conformities; her fear that he would fly again; her fear that the wavering job was making him indecisive.
And Martin Dockerill kept coming, as an excellent starting-point for dissension.
Ruth did not dislike Martin's roughness, but when the ex-mechanic discovered that he was making more money than was Carl, and asked Carl, in her presence, if he'd like a loan, then she hated Martin, and would give no reason. She became unable to see him as anything but a boor, an upstart servant, whose friendship with Carl indicated that her husband, too, was an "outsider." Believing that she was superbly holding herself in, she asked Carl if there was not some way of tactfully suggesting to Martin that he come to the flat only once in two weeks, instead of two or three times a week. Carl was angry. She said furiously what she really thought, and retired to Aunt Emma's for the evening. When she returned she expected to find Carl as repentant as herself. Unfortunately that same Carl who had declared that it was pure egotism to regard one's own religion or country as necessarily sacred, regarded his own friends as sacred—a noble faith which is an important cause of political graft. He was ramping about the living-room, waiting for a fight—and he got it.
Their moment of indiscretion. The inevitable time when, believing themselves fearlessly frank, they exaggerated every memory of an injury. Ruth pointed out that Carl had disliked Florence Crewden as much as she had disliked Martin. She renewed her accusation that he was vacillating; scoffed at Walter MacMonnies (whom she really liked), Gertie Cowles (whom she had never met), and even, hesitatingly, Carl's farmer relatives.
And Carl was equally unpleasant. At her last thrust he called her a thin-blooded New-Yorker and slammed his bedroom door. They had broken their pledge not to go to bed on a quarrel.
He was gone before she came out to breakfast in the morning.
In the evening they were perilously polite again. Martin Dockerill appeared and, while Ruth listened, Carl revealed how savagely his mind had turned overnight to a longing for such raw adventuring as she could never share. He feverishly confessed that he had for many weeks wavered between hating the whole war and wanting to enlist in the British Aero Corps, to get life's supreme sensation—scouting ten thousand feet in air, while dozens of batteries fired at him; a nose-to-earth volplane. The thinking Carl, the playmate Carl that Ruth knew, was masked as the foolhardy adventurer—and as one who was not merely talking, but might really do the thing he pictured. And Martin Dockerill seemed so dreadfully to take it for granted that Carl might go.
Carl's high note of madness dropped to a matter-of-fact chatter about a kind of wandering which shut her out as completely as did the project of war. "I don't know," said he, "but what the biggest fun in chasing round the country is to get up from a pile of lumber where you've pounded your ear all night and get that funny railroad smell of greasy waste, and then throw your feet for a hand-out and sneak on a blind and go hiking off to some town you've never heard of, with every brakie and constabule out after you. That's living!"
When Martin was gone Carl glanced at her. She stiffened and pretended to be absorbed in a magazine. He took from the mess of papers and letters that lived in his inside coat pocket a war-map he had clipped from a newspaper, and drew tactical lines on it. From his room he brought a small book he had bought that day. He studied it intently. Ruth managed to see that the title of the book was Aeroplanes and Air-Scouting in the European Armies.