She was looking around. “But, Harry, really!
Look at this floor. Two more huge rooms.
What can we—”
“Mice and Mumps!” groaned Harry, straining
at the tap. “Mice and Mumps!”
He came to her wiping his hands on his handkerchief.
“Too big! Look here, supposing this house
isn’t washed away by that tap. Suppose
it’s still standing here tomorrow. Take
a broad, courageous view of the thing. Suppose
this isn’t the beginning of the Great Flood
of London, and that we’re going to live in a
house and not an ark. Well, what you’ve
got to remember is that we’re not coming in here
for a week. We’ve got to look ahead.
Take these two rooms. Why, you can see what they’re
for, what they’ve been. Opening into one
another, and those little bars on the windows, and
that protected fireplace. Nurseries. Day
nursery and night nursery.”
Rosalie laughed.
That’s all done. The thing traverses the
waters of the years, as across seas a ship, and makes
presently a new shore, a new clime, wherein are met
occasions new and strange, not anticipated by Rosalie.
Here is one.
Habitant in the new continent across these years,
she is wife and, though she had laughed, is mother,
and on a day is with her Harry, and Harry is saying,
not at all with any hardness in his voice, but very
gravely:
“I have a right to a home.”
She replies, as grave as he, as one debating a matter
that is weighty but that is before the arbitrament,
not of feeling, but of reason, “Harry, you have
a home.”
A gesture of his head, much comprehensive, is made
by him: “Is this a home?”
“It’s where we live.”
“Ah, where we live, Rosalie!”
She did not reply to this. Himself, and not she,
spoke next; but his note was as though she had answered
and he were speaking in his turn. “I have
a right to a home. The children have a right to
a home.”
She said, “Then, Harry, give yourself a home.
Give the children a home.”
He said, “Rosalie, I am a man.”
She answered, “Harry, I am a woman.”
Harry was smoking and he indrew an inhalation from
his pipe with a long sibilant sound: her answer
was very well understood by him.
No, she never had anticipated this.
Yet might not she have seen? Astounding how in
life one’s suddenly engulfed in depths and never
has perceived the shoals from which they led; suddenly
entombed in night and never has perceived the gradual
declination of the day! Why, when she looked back,
so far away as in those days of choosing their house
had been in seed this thing that now was come to fruit.
And she had watched it grow from seed to seedling,
and on to bud and blossom, and never had suspected.
But had she not? Then it was curious, she knew,
that, alone of all her thoughts, all her beliefs,
all her theories, her observations and her deductions
from her observations, curious that of them all only
a certain observation, made when choosing their house,
she never had told to Harry.
