His heart ached with remorse as he thought of the life to which he had condemned her. Why, like Stephen, she had been buried alive in a shaft deep under the earth, and she had not even had Stephen’s poor passionate outlet of misdirected fury. What she thought was her duty had held her bound fast in a death-like silence and passivity. He remembered the somber, taciturn, self-contained woman who had sat opposite him, year after year, at the supper-table. Could that be the same Eva who now, evening after evening, made them all gay with her accounts of the humors of her profession; who could take off a fussy customer so to the life that even Stephen laughed; who could talk with such inspired animation of the variations of fashion that even he listened, deadly as was his hatred for fashion and all that it stood for! He had never even suspected that Eva had this jolly sense of humor! Could it be the same Eva who so briskly dealt the cards around every evening and took up her hand with such interest? Those evenings of whist had been an inspiration of his, in answer to two questions he had set himself: What could he invent that would keep Eva’s mind off the housekeeping in the evenings? And what could he and Eva and the children do together, which they would all really and truly enjoy--what was some natural manner in which to make a civilized contact between the two generations and the widely differing temperaments? It was delightful to him to see how Eva enjoyed it, how she liked to win (just think of her caring to win! How young in nature she remained! She made him feel like Methuselah!). How cheerily and heartily she coached Henry along, how the children admired her skill and luck, and how she enjoyed their admiration. Heavens! How unhappy she must have been before, like a Titan forced to tend a miniature garden; forced to turn the great flood of that inherited, specialized ability of hers into the tiny shallow channels of the infinitely minute detail of child-care; forced, day after day, hour by hour, minute by minute, with no respite, into a life-and-death closeness of contact with the raw, unfinished personalities of the children, from which her own ripe maturity recoiled in an ever-renewed impatience. Eva always hated anything unfinished! And nothing around her ever stayed unfinished very long. How she put through any job she undertook! She had sat up all one night to finish that sofa she had so wonderfully refurbished. But you couldn’t put through the job of bringing up children. No amount of energy on your part, no, not if you sat up all night every night of your life, could hurry by a single instant the slow unfolding from within of a child’s nature.... Eva dropped out of Lester’s mind whenever he thought of this, and he was all flooded with the sweet, early-morning light that shone from his daughter’s childhood. He always felt like taking off his hat when he thought of Helen.