She ended on an open note. He glanced at her again and again, furtively, but with growing admiration and lessening confusion.
"No!" he said. "This kind of thing suits you. You are splendid! No, I don't think you can go back."
He was thinking of her in the New York flat, pale, silent, oppressing him terribly. He was the soul of gentle timidity, in his human relations, and her silent, awful hostility after the baby was born, had frightened him deeply. Because he had realised she couldn't help it. Women were like that. Their feelings took a reverse direction, even against their own selves, and it was awful—awful! Awful, awful to live in the house with a woman like that, whose feelings were reversed even against herself! He had felt himself ground down under the millstone of her helpless enmity. She had ground even herself down to the quick, and the child as well. No, anything rather than that.
"But what about you?" she asked.
"I? Oh, I!—I can carry an the business; and—er—come over here for the holidays—as long as you like to stay. You stay as long as you wish." He looked, a long time down at the earth, then glanced up at her with a touch of supplication in his uneasy eyes.
"Even for ever?"
"Well—er—yes, if you like. For ever is a long time. One can't set a date."
"And I can: do anything I like?" She looked him straight in the eyes, challenging. And he was powerless against her rosy, wind-hardened nakedness.
"Er—yes!—I suppose so! So long as you don't make yourself unhappy—or the boy."
Again he looked up at her with, a complicated, uneasy appeal—thinking of the child; but hoping for himself.