Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/222

210 I remember how I sat one evenings in the after-dinner hour when we were together in the study, observing her and translating her thoughts into my words, somewhat as above: and how at last, smiling at her for a poor dear child, I got up, and went and chucked her under the chin, and in a serious way that made her eyes looking at me brighten up at the anticipation of one of the old erratic hours, the old erratic hours so often full of the golden atmosphere of heaven. And indeed there was a temptation in the air for me to enjoy one of those hours again. Why not? I commenced. But it soon made itself apparent to me that I had set myself, not to be, but to act.

And Rosy showed that she too perceived, perhaps more clearly than I gave her credit for, that it was not the doer but rather the actor that was wooing her. She was up and away in a pet: I, tickled by the idea of energetic desire in my Rosebud, laughing consumedly, careless how she took it. Then all at once I realised that I had once more been cruel to her: nay, but the word should be stronger, brutal. I was serious at once, and away to her to try and soothe her. And succeeded, and we had, as she said, a happy time again.

Nevertheless her discontent with the new intercourse, as I now called it to myself, and to which I promptly returned, seemed to increase. And at last I found out that the more cheerful and obliging I was, the more uncheerful and disobliging was she, and this discovery having come to a head during the course of a whole evening, erupted in the bedroom in the shape of what is usually (I believe) called a 'scene,' reproaches and tears versus sarcasm and silence. After a few minutes of Tears, Silence betook itself out of the bedroom and the house for a long ramble about the streets, and at last joining itself to Thought in preference to Irritation, with which it had set out, I began to draw a sort of picture of what life would have been with a woman—like Rayne, a strong woman! Rayne had, I felt, been for some time an elevation to me, and now it seemed that she was growing into an ideal. After all, was she not the outward and visible sign of that inward and