could be twisted into looking like one.
If he had refrained from urging motherhood upon her, if he'd given her
the benefit of his special knowledge, didn't her interest in her career
as a singer establish the presumption that it was her wish rather than
his that they were following. Had she ever said she'd like to have a
baby? Or even hinted?

He pulled himself up. There was no good going over that again.

He bathed and shaved and dressed himself in fresh clothes, operations
which had been perforce omitted at the cottage this morning in favor of
his departure without arousing Paula. (He'd slept, or rather lain awake,
upon the hammock in the veranda.) When he came down-stairs he found
Pete's wife already in the kitchen, gave her directions about his
breakfast and then from force of habit, thought of his morning paper. The
delivery of it had been discontinued, of course, for the months the house
was closed, so he walked down to Division Street to get one.

He had got his mind into a fairly quiescent state by then which made the
trick it played when he first caught sight of the great stacks of
_Tribunes_ and _Heralds_ on the corner news-stand all the more
terrifying. It had the force of an hallucination; as if in the head-lines
he actually saw the word suicide in thick black letters. And his
daughter's name underneath.

He had managed, somehow, to evade that word; to refrain from putting into
any words at all the peril Mary had so narrowly escaped, although the
fact had hung, undisguised, between him and March during the moment they
stared at each other before they went up-stairs together. It avenged that
evasion by leaping upon him now. He bought his paper and hurried home
with it under his arm, feeling as if it might still contain the news of
that tragedy.

Reacting from this irrational panic he tried to discount the whole thing.
March hadn't lied, of course, but, being a lover, he had exaggerated. As
John sat over his breakfast he got to feeling quite comfortable about
this. His mind went back to the breakfast he had had with Mary at Ravinia
--breakfast after much such an abominable night as this last had
been--the breakfast they had left for that talk under the trees beside
the lake. And then his own words came back and stabbed him.

He had been arguing with her his right to extinguish himself if he chose.
He had said he had no religion real enough to make a valid denial of that
right. It was a question no one e