“Sally out where? He can have me always as much as he has me now. We don’t need to outgrow our friends? Really, Tom, you have a vision of the world that compares with Don Quixote’s. Giants and windmills.”
“Very good, dear incorrigible Motherer.” He came close and his arms enlaced her waist: their cheeks touched. “You shall always have your two boys to make behave and keep at your breast. So long as you live.” Cornelia swayed with him, smiling. “But between feed-times, you shall let them play in the streets.” She struggled away.
“You’re horrid—you’re cruel!” There were tears as she pushed him off.
Or his days of strategy....
“I am doing my best,” he said, “to undermine you with him. There’ll not be a shred of you left in his heart, dear Sis, when I’ve done picking you to pieces.” Which was precisely what he was about, and whose telling disarmed Cornelia altogether. Surely, if he were in truth betraying her, he would not be telling her about it. So she reckoned. While David argued that Tom’s often disquieting reflections on Cornelia must in some deep way be related with the real love he knew he bore her. With this true, there could not be betrayal.
The two young men were together more and more. They sat in Tom’s warm room; their words were of high things. They knew that these were things that were not. Tom knew these things would never be: David that they must. They met in the present of life as two might take hands down an echoing corridor: close, though the one thought at the passage-end was life; the other death.
From these talks came the sense of his emptiness to Tom as he began to feed. He knew it only in the yearn he carried with him more and more for somewhat he lacked, in that nausea for the present which was dooming his love for Marcia Duffield, and making of his professional affairs a clear, cold, removed design that he learned to trace with the tips of his calm fingers. The mood helped him with Cornelia.
He went to her morose, and said kind things—angry things that in their conveyance of his troubled spirit stressed his apartness from David.
“I have been at it again, Cornelia.”
He sat abject on her couch, laid his hands on his feet with a gesture of humility in which alone a Hindu could have seen the pride. His eyes dwelt on his sister’s cast of a pretty boy—a boy with laughing hair and a face that was a flower. Tom’s lips were still. It seemed his eyes that spoke. He loved when he came to Cornelia’s place to cast off his coat and flare his collar wide from his tense neck. The muscles in his throat seemed over-stressed for the low tone and the small volume of his words.