He asked, in consternation, what the matter was.  What had happened?

“Nothing,” she said.  “Absolutely nothing.  Really.”

“Then it’s just—­that you’re not happy.  With me, like this.”  He brought that out gravely, a word at a time; as though they hurt.

“Are you happy?  With me—­like this?” she countered.

It was a question he could not answer categorically and she did not give him time for anything else.  “What’s the matter with us, Roddy?” she demanded.  “We ought to be happy.  We meant to be.  We said that we’d been through a lot, and that probably there was a lot mere to go through—­in the way of working things out, at least—­and that we’d take a month just for nothing but to be happy in—­just for pure joy.”  Her voice broke in a sob over that.  “And here we are—­like this!”

“It hasn’t all been like this,” he said.  “There have been hours, a day or two, that I’d go through the whole thing for, again, if necessary.”

She nodded assent to that.  “But the rest of the time!” she cried.  “Why can’t we be—­comfortable together?  Why ...  Roddy, why can’t you be natural with me?  Like your old self.  Why don’t you roar at me any more?  And swear when you run into things?  I’ve never seen you formal before —­not with anybody.  Not even with strangers.  And now you’re formal with me.”

The rueful grin with which he acknowledged the truth of this indictment was more like him, and it cheered her immensely.  She answered it with one of her own, dried her eyes and asked again, more collectedly: 

“Well, can you tell me why?”

“Why, it seemed to me,” he said, “that it was you who were different.  And you have changed, of course, down inside, more than I have.  You’ve been through things in the last year and a half; found out things that I know nothing about, except as I have read about them in books.  I’ve never had to ask a stranger for a job.  I’ve never been—­brought to bay, the way you were in that damned town of Centropolis (I’d like to burn it).  And other things—­horrible things, have—­have come so near you, that if it hadn’t been for that—­white flame of yours, they’d have marked you.  When I think of those things I feel like a schoolboy beside you.  You’ve no idea how—­how innocent a man can be, Rose.  That’s not the tradition, but it’s true.  So, when I remember how things used to be between us, how I used to be the one who knew things, and how I preached and spouted, I get to feeling that the man you remember must look to you now, like—­well, like a schoolboy.  Showing off.”

She stared at him incredulously.  “But that’s downright morbid,” she said.  “You don’t have to go—­into the gutter to learn things.  And what you say about innocence ...  A man can’t keep his innocence by being ignorant, Roddy.  If he’s kept it, he must have—­fought for it.  I know that.”

She was still deeply disturbed.  “It’s horrible that I should make you feel like that,” she concluded.