Followed their first period of coldness, which she ended with a flood of tears and a fierce hunger for possession and to be possessed by him compared with which that of their early days paled in his memory. This brought him to a misery from which he could see no escape but in the desire to appease her, and he dissembled and seemed to accept his position as a husband, one caught and bound and confined wholly to the existence of the woman he had wedded, finding no pleasure but in hers, no comradeship but in her society, no warmth but in her approbation. Thinking to please her, he said one day when they were over a year married: "The room over the study--that would be the best for the nursery when we want one." "But, René," she answered, after a pause, "we don't want to have children yet, do we?" Despair seized him. He could not look at her. "No. No. Of course, it is as you please." She smiled awry: "Oh, my dear, I didn't mean you to take it like that. It sounded horrid, I know. But for modern men and women, it ought to be possible----" He could not let her finish. He hated her talk of "modern men and women," as though some change had come over human nature. "I sometimes think," he said, "that no single word has the same meaning for the two of us. Your Love is not my Love, your Yes is not my Yes, your No is not mine." "Oh, René, you do say some terrible things! Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you are just a helpless silly baby, and sometimes you seem to know more than anybody I ever met. You are so strong, but you don't seem to know what to do with your strength, and I am terrified of you . . . Oh, I don't know what to do with you! Can't we be just happy?" "Just happy! . . . I suppose we can." "We have been . . . Haven't we?" "We have been," he said, but the words in his mind were: "No more than happy." To avoid hurting her he had abandoned the use of even that much introspective power that he had come by in Yorkshire by the sea. Now he worked, let the days run by on the wheels of habit, and gave her as good a counterfeit as he could make of what she desired. She decided in her own mind that he was working too hard, and must be taken out of his solitude, which she ascribed to his inability to find his feet socially after being lifted out of his own class, and dumped into hers. Her brother was wanting to get rid of his first small two-cylinder car to buy a new 30-40 h.p. She made him an offer for the little car, and he closed with it and undertook to teach René to drive. That was not a very difficult matter. Two lessons sufficed, and René was left with the car on his hands and no knowledge of its mechanism. "But what shall I do if it breaks down?" "It can't break down," said Kurt. "The magneto can't go wrong. If she stops, clean the sparking plug or put in a new one. It must be that or the jet."