know her the least little bit she's absolutely made up her mind never
to be frightened like that again. She is going to hurl herself into a
perfect whirlpool of excitement and entertainment and drag Peter with
her if she can. Meanwhile, behind that hard little head of hers, she's
making plans just as fast as she can make them. I believe she looks on
life now as though it had broken the compact that she made with it--a
compact that things should always be easy, comfortable, above all, never
threatening. The present must be calm but the Future's absolutely got to
be--and I believe, although she loves him devotedly in the depths of
her strange little soul, that she half blames Peter for all of this
disturbance, and that there are a great many things about him--his
earlier life, his earlier friends, even his work--that she would strip
from him if she could.
“Well, enough for the present. I don't know _what_ nonsense there isn't
here. Into the envelope it all goes. I've been talking to you for an
hour and a half and that's something....”
II
“... I've just come in from dinner with Peter and Clare and feel
inclined to talk to you for hours ahead. However, that I can't do, so I
shall write to you instead and you're to regard it all as a continuation
of the things that I said in last night's letter. I am as interested as
ever and indeed, after this evening's dinner more interested. The odd
thing about it all is that Peter is so completely oblivious to any
change that may be going on in Clare. His whole mind is centred now on
the baby, he cannot have enough of it and it was he, and not Clare, who
took me up after dinner to see it sleeping.
“You remember that they had some kind of a dispute about the name of
the boy at the time of the christening. Peter insisted that it should
be Stephen, after, I suppose, that odd Cornish friend of his, and Clare,
weak and ill though she was, objected with all her might. I don't know
why she took this so much to heart but it was all, I suppose, part
of that odd hatred that she has of Peter's earlier life and earlier
friends. She has never met the man Brant, but I think that she fancies
that he is going to swoop down one of these days and carry Peter off
on a broomstick or something. She gave in about the name--indeed I have
never seen Peter more determined--but I think, nevertheless, that she
broods over it and remembers it. My dear, I am as sorry for her as I
can be. There she stands, loving Peter with all her heart and soul,
terrified out of her wits at the possibilities that life is presenting
to her, hating Peter's friends at one moment, his work the next, the
baby the next--exactly like some one, walking on a window-ledge in his
sleep and suddenly waking and discovering--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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