"No! You aren't. I come home from class, and you aren't here. I come home at night, from a committee meeting, and you've gone to sleep because you need to be fresh for your own work. This isn't complaining. I just want you to see how you've changed. Why, take this matter of the Buxton professorship. When I spoke of it, the one thing it meant to you was that you might have to leave New York. That's all you could see in it. I haven't been able to discuss it with you, although it might seem important." Perhaps all that was true. Catherine felt a trickle of doubt through the solid wall of her intention. She had been tired--had she seemed indifferent, absorbed? In a wave of heat the trickle was consumed. She wanted to cry out, "It's not with me that difference lies. It is in you! You wish to blame me, for your turning away--to Stella Partridge. You think I don't know about that!" He moved uneasily, fidgetting with the painted silk shade of the table lamp. "All right," she said brusquely. "We'll leave it at that. I am self-absorbed. Selfish." "I expected you would tire of it long before now," said Charles. "Long hours in an office, at someone's beck and call. When you might be perfectly free to do as you please. I swear I don't see what you get out of it." "You don't see, do you?" Catherine's eyes were suddenly piteous. "You don't see at all." "It's evident enough that you can't swing the two jobs, home and office. You're worn out all the time. Irritable." "Oh!" Catherine's hand pressed against her breast. Something extraordinary in his ingenuous construction of a case against her. "Now if you could earn more than I do, then I might stay home, give up my work. But you don't. You barely swing the additional expenses you incur. Sometimes I think I'll accept the Buxton offer, just to take you--and the children--out of this city." Catherine's heart, under her cold fingers, stood still for a long moment and then broke into violent, irregular beating. "You would have to be sure"--she wondered if he could hear her words--"that I would go!" At that she hurried out of the room. She undressed in clumsy haste, and crawled into bed, where she shivered, unable to relax, unable to stop the trampling of heavy thoughts through her mind. Charles came in, and went with elaborate unconcern about the business of going to bed. Her mind was a sling-shot, drawn tight to hurl at him innumerable bits of sentences, clattering stones from the ruck thrown off from what they had said. But she held them in, to rattle against her own brain. When he had turned off the light and was at last quiet in his own bed, the dark rose between them heavy, thick. She was aware, in a kind of torment, of his faintest motion. I must sleep, she thought. If I could shut off these thoughts! She twisted one arm up under her face, her mouth pressed hard on the cold flesh.