"But you have decided." Her effort to keep her voice steady flattened all its intonations. "Decided that it is much the best thing for your career, much the best for the children." "I can't drag you off unless you wish to go. I hoped you would like it, too. It--well, it is something of an honor, you know. The way they keep after me. There's a large appropriation for a laboratory. I'd have very little teaching. They seem to have some idea of a creative department." Catherine was silent. There was something shaking and ludicrous, in the way that courageous light of afternoon had been snuffed out. Why, she had thought she stood at last in a clear road, where she could be sure of direction, and here she was only at the core of the labyrinth again, knocked blindly into an angle of blind wall. "Catherine!" he cried out against her silence. "If it wasn't for this damned idea of yours, you'd care what happened to me!" Whirling about in the lane of her labyrinth, shutting her eyes to its maze. "I do care, Charles. That's the trouble." "After all, it's not just me. It's the children and you, isn't it?" He fiddled with the blotter, shoved it along the desk. "I think it will be infinitely better for you, too." His chin was obdurate. "New York is no place. Overstimulates you. At a place like Buxton, life is more normal. There's a woman's Faculty Club," he added, triumphantly. Catherine laughed. "Teas?" she said, "or literary afternoons?" "They're fine women. Cathy, don't laugh. I hoped you would like it." "Like it?" She flung out her hands, sensitive, empty palms upwards. "I've just been there! I know what it is like. But I know"--she was sober again--"why, there's nothing for me to do but say yes, is there? I can't say that Buxton offers me no opportunity, except to be a monkey woman, can I?" "What?" "Nothing." She doubled a fist against her mouth, and stared at him. "You've been so sweet these last days." Charles reached for her hand, held it between both of his. "Things were ghastly mixed up, and then we seemed straight again, you and I. You know everything's been wrong since you first took that damned office job. I can't stand it! Our yapping at each other. I hoped you would want to throw it over. I do care about your being happy. Cathy, if you believe, honestly, that it's more important that you should stay here, I'll try to see it that way." Her hand was reluctant, cold, in the warm, steady pressure of his. "I can't believe it, alone." The labyrinth shut her in, black, enclosing. "You'd have to believe it, yourself. And you don't." "It's different, considering the children, too, as well as you and me. What you do, in an office, takes you away from me. What I do, Cathy, that is yours, too, isn't it?" His fingers crept up about her wrist; beneath them her life beat in heavy, slow rhythm. "It knocks the stuffing fairly out of everything, if I think you don't care."