Stephen could not understand it.

Nor was this all.  She became extraordinarily solicitous for his welfare, especially in the matter of health.  She wrapped him up when he went out, and unpacked him when he came in.  She cautioned him against draughts, overwork, microbes, and dietary indiscretions.  Thanks to regular boxing exercise, his old dyspepsia had almost entirely disappeared, but this did not prevent her from watching every mouthful that vanished under the portals of his moustache.  And she superintended his boxing too.  She made a point of being present whenever he and Charlie boxed, and she would force Charlie to cease fighting at the oddest moments.  She was flat against having a motor-car; she compelled Stephen to drive to the station in the four-wheeler instead of in the high dogcart.  Indeed, from the way she guarded him, he might have been the one frail life that stood between England and anarchy.

And she was always so kind, in a rather melancholy, resigned, wistful fashion.

No.  Stephen could not understand it.

There came a time when Stephen could neither understand it nor stand it.  And he tried to worm out of her her secret.  But he could not.  The fascinating little liar stoutly stuck to it that nothing was the matter with her, and that she had nothing on her mind.  Stephen knew differently.  He consulted Charlie Woodruff.  She had not made a confidant of Charlie.  Charlie was exactly as much in the dark as Stephen.  Then Stephen (I regret to have to say it) took to swearing.  For instance, he swore when she hid all his thin socks and so obliged him to continue with his thick ones.  And one day he swore when, in answer to his query why she was pale, she said she didn’t know.

He thus, without expecting to do so, achieved a definite climax.

For she broke out.  She ceased in half a second to be pale.  She gave him with cutting candour all that had been bottled up in her entrancing bosom.  She told him that the witch had foreseen her a widow (which was the same thing as prophesying his death), and that she had done, and was doing, all that the ingenuity of a loving heart could suggest to keep him alive in spite of the prediction, but that, in face of his infamous brutality, she should do no more; that if he chose to die and leave her a widow he might die and leave her a widow for all she cared; in brief, that she had done with him.

When she had become relatively calm Stephen addressed her calmly, and even ingratiatingly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and added, “but you know you did say that you were hiding nothing from me.”

“Of course,” she retorted, “because I was.”  Her arguments were usually on this high plane of logic.

“And you ought not to be so superstitious,” Stephen proceeded.

“Well,” said she, with truth, “one never knows.”  And she wiped away a tear and showed the least hint of an inclination to kiss him.  “And anyhow my only anxiety was for you.”