He came to her wiping his hands on his handkerchief. “Too big! Look here, supposing this house isn’t washed away by that tap. Suppose it’s still standing here tomorrow. Take a broad, courageous view of the thing. Suppose this isn’t the beginning of the Great Flood of London, and that we’re going to live in a house and not an ark. Well, what you’ve got to remember is that we’re not coming in here for a week. We’ve got to look ahead. Take these two rooms. Why, you can see what they’re for, what they’ve been. Opening into one another, and those little bars on the windows, and that protected fireplace. Nurseries. Day nursery and night nursery.” Rosalie laughed. CHAPTER IV That’s all done. The thing traverses the waters of the years, as across seas a ship, and makes presently a new shore, a new clime, wherein are met occasions new and strange, not anticipated by Rosalie. Here is one. Habitant in the new continent across these years, she is wife and, though she had laughed, is mother, and on a day is with her Harry, and Harry is saying, not at all with any hardness in his voice, but very gravely: “I have a right to a home.” She replies, as grave as he, as one debating a matter that is weighty but that is before the arbitrament, not of feeling, but of reason, “Harry, you have a home.” A gesture of his head, much comprehensive, is made by him: “Is this a home?” “It’s where we live.” “Ah, where we live, Rosalie!” She did not reply to this. Himself, and not she, spoke next; but his note was as though she had answered and he were speaking in his turn. “I have a right to a home. The children have a right to a home.” She said, “Then, Harry, give yourself a home. Give the children a home.” He said, “Rosalie, I am a man.” She answered, “Harry, I am a woman.” Harry was smoking and he indrew an inhalation from his pipe with a long sibilant sound: her answer was very well understood by him. No, she never had anticipated this. Yet might not she have seen? Astounding how in life one’s suddenly engulfed in depths and never has perceived the shoals from which they led; suddenly entombed in night and never has perceived the gradual declination of the day! Why, when she looked back, so far away as in those days of choosing their house had been in seed this thing that now was come to fruit. And she had watched it grow from seed to seedling, and on to bud and blossom, and never had suspected. But had she not? Then it was curious, she knew, that, alone of all her thoughts, all her beliefs, all her theories, her observations and her deductions from her observations, curious that of them all only a certain observation, made when choosing their house, she never had told to Harry.