"
"It isn't that alone," he declared, grave-faced still,
but with a softer voice. "Do you remember what I said
the other day? It would make all the difference in the world
to me, if--if you were really--actually my other half!"
The phrase which he had caught at seemed, as it fell upon
the air, to impregnate it with some benumbing quality.
The husband and wife looked dumbly, almost vacantly at
one another, for what appeared a long time.
"I mean"--all at once Thorpe found tongue, and even a sort
of fluency as he progressed--"I mean, if you shared things
really with me! Oh, I'm not complaining; you mustn't
think that. The agreement we made at the start--you've kept
your part of it perfectly. You've done better than that:
you've kept still about the fact that it made you unhappy."
"Oh no," she interposed, gently. "It is not the fact
that it has made me unhappy."
"Well--discontented, then," he resumed, without pause.
"Here we are. We do the thing we want to do--we make
the kind of home for ourselves that we've agreed we
would like--and then it turns out that somehow it
doesn't come up to expectations. You get tired of it.
I suppose, if the truth were known, I'm by way of being
tired of it too. Well, if you look at it, that fact is
the most important thing in the world for both of us.
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