"Until you learn to take orders you aren't going to amount to much, Marie-Louise."
"I amount to a great deal. And your ideas are—old-fashioned; that's what your Eve says, Dr. Dicky."
She looked at him through her long eyelashes. "What's the matter with your Eve?"
"What do you mean?"
"She is punishing you, but you don't know it. She is down-stairs playing bridge with Pip and Tony and Win, and leaving you alone to meditate on your sins. And you aren't meditating. You are talking to me. I am going to write a poem about a Laggard Lover. I'll make you a shepherd boy who sits on the hills and watches his sheep. And when the girl who loves him calls to him, he refuses to go—he still watches—his sheep."
He looked puzzled. "I don't know in the least what you are talking about."
"You are the shepherd. Your work is the sheep—Eve is the girl. Your work will always be more to you than the woman. Dad's work isn't. He never forgets mother for a minute."
"And you think that I'll forget Eve?"
"Yes. And she'll hate that."
There was a spark in his eye.