Silence again, murky, uncomfortable. Finally the ordeal of dinner was done with. Charles offered, with detectable ostentation, to read to Marian. Spencer pulled his chair around until the back cut him off in a corner with his book on radio-practice. Catherine, after consultation with Mrs. O'Lay, withdrew to the study, where she opened her drawer of the desk, and spread out the array of bills. Not all of them were in yet; this was only the second of January, and a holiday at that. But there were enough! She set down figures, added, grimly--how few bills it took to make a hundred dollars!--and all the time, under the external business of reckoning, whirled a tumult of half recognized thoughts. Unendurable, that dissension should be tangled enough to catch the children in its meshes. Since Christmas day she had held herself remote, ice-enclosed. She had felt Charles try to reach her, felt his fingers slip, chilled, from her impenetrable surface, until he chose this method. As if he brandished the tender body of a child as his weapon, threatening to bruise it against her hard aloofness. Her hands dropped idly on the tormenting bills, and she let herself fully into that whirling tumult. Whatever happened, she must prevent another hour like that at dinner. If they must be opposed, she and Charles, it must be in themselves, not with the children as buffers or weapons. When they had gone to bed, she would go in to Charles. Could she say, I know you are in love with Stella Partridge? Did she know it? If she said that, he might think that this trip, her going away, was revenge, or jealousy. Well, wasn't it? She could hear his voice, dramatizing the fairy story he read, so that Marian broke in occasionally with faint "Oh's!" or delighted giggles. Why had she decided that she must go? Defense, perhaps; not revenge. She felt again that strong, twisted cable of her own integrity. He wanted her submissive, docile, violating herself. He might say that she had driven him away, had failed him. But Stella--that had begun months ago. She could pick up threads of evidence, all down the days since summer. Then he might deny it, being secretly bland and pleased that she revealed herself as jealous, like a beggar at a door where she had once dwelt. Perhaps there was little to the affair. She had a brief, strange fancy--he had swung slightly in his orbit, so that the side toward her was cold, dead, like the dark face of the moon--and the light, the awareness of her--all of that was turned away, out of possibility of any incidence, any impingement from her. No. She would tell him only that she wanted to go away for a few weeks. That she would arrange everything so that his life would be quite as always. That she hoped--faint hope!--that he might find some small pleasure in this degree of success she had achieved.