“If I were ill, Roddy,” she said, “and there was an operation talked about; if they said to you that there was something I might drag along for years, half alive, without, but that if I had it, it would either kill or cure, you wouldn’t urge delay.  We’d decide for or against it and be done.  It’s—­it’s taking just all the courage I’ve got to face this thing now that I am excited—­now that I’ve thought it out and talked it out with you—­now that I’ve got the big hope before my eyes.  But to wait until I was tangled in the old routine and the babies began to get a little older and more—­human, so that they knew me, and then do it in cold blood!  I couldn’t do that.  We’d patch up some sort of a life, pretending a little, quarreling a little, and when my feelings got especially hurt about something, I’d try to make myself think, and you, that I was going away.  And we’d both know down inside that we were cowards.”

He protested against the word, but she stuck to it.

“We’re both afraid now,” she insisted.  “That’s one of the things that makes us so cruel to each other when we talk—­fear.  The world’s a terrible place to me, Roddy.  I’ve never ventured out alone in it; not a step.  A year ago, I don’t think I’d have been so frightened.  I didn’t know then—­I’d never really thought about it—­what a hard dangerous thing it is, just to earn enough to keep yourself alive.  I haven’t any illusions now that it’s easy—­not after the things I’ve heard Barry Lake tell about.  But sometimes I think you’re more afraid than I; and that you’ve got a more intolerable thing to fear—­ridicule—­an intangible sort of pitying ridicule that you can’t get hold of; guessing at the sort of things people will say and never really quite knowing.  And we have each got the other’s fear to suffer under, too.—­Oh, Roddy, Roddy, don’t hate me too bitterly ...!  But I think if we can both endure it, stand the gaff, as you said once, and know that the other’s standing it, too, perhaps that’ll be the real beginning of the new life.”

Somehow or other, during their calmer moments toward the end, practical details managed to get talked about—­settled after a fashion, without the admission really being made on his part that the thing was going to happen at all.

“I’d do everything I could of course, to make it easier,” she said.  “We could have a story for people that I’d gone to California to make mother a long visit.  You could bring Harriet home from Washington to keep house while I was gone.  I’d take my trunks, you see, and really go.  People would suspect of course, after a while, but they’ll always pretend to believe anything that’s comfortable—­anything that saves scenes and shocks and explanations.”

“Where would you go, really?” he demanded.  “Have you any plan at all?”

“I have a sort of plan,” she said.  “I think I know of a way of earning a living.”

But she didn’t offer to go on and tell him what it was, and after a little silence, he commented bitterly on this omission.