“Have you finished your letter?” she asked. He thought he heard faint amusement in her tone, but not a trace of jealousy.
“No, I’m not going to write any more to-night,” he said. “I’m not in the mood for it for some reason. I can’t say what I want to say.”
“Cassandra won’t know if it’s well written or badly written,” Katharine remarked.
“I’m not so sure about that. I should say she has a good deal of literary feeling.”
“Perhaps,” said Katharine indifferently. “You’ve been neglecting my education lately, by the way. I wish you’d read something. Let me choose a book.” So speaking, she went across to his bookshelves and began looking in a desultory way among his books. Anything, she thought, was better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the distance between them. As she pulled one book forward and then another she thought ironically of her own certainty not an hour ago; how it had vanished in a moment, how she was merely marking time as best she could, not knowing in the least where they stood, what they felt, or whether William loved her or not. More and more the condition of Mary’s mind seemed to her wonderful and enviable—if, indeed, it could be quite as she figured it—if, indeed, simplicity existed for any one of the daughters of women.
“Swift,” she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle this question at least. “Let us have some Swift.”
Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression of deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and would not say anything until his mind were made up.
Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked at him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could not have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some assurance of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind. Peevishness, complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to, but this attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the consciousness of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was going to happen next.
At last William spoke.
“I think it’s a little odd, don’t you?” he said, in a voice of detached reflection. “Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if their marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren’t; now how do you account for that?”