In his relief, he became quite charming.  He began to joke, and “be good” just like a child who had worried all day for a treat and been granted it by a weak mother who had reached the limit of endurance.  He joked and told her stories and was more pleasant than she had ever seen him.

“You are a darling, you know, and you do spoil me, girlie,” he said, kissing her hand.  “You forgive me for being a baby, don’t you?”

She could not say she didn’t, as she smoothed the damp hair from his forehead.

In her mood caused by his brightening spirits she felt she could not go on reading “L’Assommoir.”  She glanced at the Sunday papers and put them down.  Louis looked at her and laughed.

“Now you’ve got the fidgets,” he said.  “Let’s do something.”

“I’ve nothing to read but that Zola thing, and a book on Symbolism that Dr. Angus sent.  And I don’t want to read a bit.  Louis, we’ll have to do something, you and I. We’re rusting.  We’ll have to get away.”

“In this heat?”

“In anything.  I’m like old Ulysses.  I cannot rest from travel.  What is it—­’How dull it is to pause, to make an end, the rust unburnished—­’ I’ve forgotten most of it.  But there’s one bit that appeals to me a great deal—­’Life piled on life were all too little—­’ I want to do millions of things in my life, don’t you?”

He lifted his eyebrows at her, and smiled placidly over a cloud of smoke.

“Let’s go along to those agencies to-morrow and say we’ll be rouseabouts without any wages, just for food.  I’d love to be a rouseabout.  It sounds so beautifully active.  ‘Rouseabout’!  I think John the Baptist was a rouseabout, don’t you?  The rouseabout of the Lord!  Oh Louis, let’s be that, shall we?”

“You’d never stand it.”

“Well, anyway, after this week we’ve got to do something.”

He immediately became petulant and worried again, so she told him blithely that she would arrange things.  She grew to do this more and more as she knew him better.  The cigarette famine that had made such a misery of the day was only typical of many things; anything that caused him the least anxiety lost him both nerve and temper, and he was only in the way.  So in self-defence she began to protect him from everything, simply making plans and trying to get him to fall in with them with the least possible friction.  And this was not very easy:  he disagreed with her arrangements on principle, though he always fell in with them later.  This, he considered, was his way of showing his man’s authority.

As it grew cooler they went up on the roof.  The iron was hot, the stone coping still warm, but there was a faint breeze blowing in from the sea, and the blue air was less heavy.

“What can we do?” he said, helplessly, looking down on the few weary people crawling through the streets.

“Nothing,” she said, leaning back against the chimney-stack.