“I wonder if it does?  How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout?  The way he calls women ‘Sister,’ and the way——­”

“Now look here!  That’ll do!  Of course I know you don’t mean it—­you’re simply hot and tired, and trying to work off your peeve on me.  But just the same, I won’t stand your jumping on Perce.  You——­It’s just like your attitude toward the war—­so darn afraid that America will become militaristic——­”

“But you are the pure patriot!”

“By God, I am!”

“Yes, I heard you talking to Sam Clark tonight about ways of avoiding the income tax!”

He had recovered enough to lock the door; he clumped up-stairs ahead of her, growling, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.  I’m perfectly willing to pay my full tax—­fact, I’m in favor of the income tax—­even though I do think it’s a penalty on frugality and enterprise—­fact, it’s an unjust, darn-fool tax.  But just the same, I’ll pay it.  Only, I’m not idiot enough to pay more than the government makes me pay, and Sam and I were just figuring out whether all automobile expenses oughn’t to be exemptions.  I’ll take a lot off you, Carrie, but I don’t propose for one second to stand your saying I’m not patriotic.  You know mighty well and good that I’ve tried to get away and join the army.  And at the beginning of the whole fracas I said—­I’ve said right along—­that we ought to have entered the war the minute Germany invaded Belgium.  You don’t get me at all.  You can’t appreciate a man’s work.  You’re abnormal.  You’ve fussed so much with these fool novels and books and all this highbrow junk——­You like to argue!”

It ended, a quarter of an hour later, in his calling her a “neurotic” before he turned away and pretended to sleep.

For the first time they had failed to make peace.

“There are two races of people, only two, and they live side by side.  His calls mine ‘neurotic’; mine calls his ‘stupid.’  We’ll never understand each other, never; and it’s madness for us to debate—­to lie together in a hot bed in a creepy room—­enemies, yoked.”

III

It clarified in her the longing for a place of her own.

“While it’s so hot, I think I’ll sleep in the spare room,” she said next day.

“Not a bad idea.”  He was cheerful and kindly.

The room was filled with a lumbering double bed and a cheap pine bureau.  She stored the bed in the attic; replaced it by a cot which, with a denim cover, made a couch by day; put in a dressing-table, a rocker transformed by a cretonne cover; had Miles Bjornstam build book-shelves.

Kennicott slowly understood that she meant to keep up her seclusion.  In his queries, “Changing the whole room?” “Putting your books in there?” she caught his dismay.  But it was so easy, once her door was closed, to shut out his worry.  That hurt her—­the ease of forgetting him.