ough
nights and days with your warm body against mine that I might live, and
now--now I know the value of life, I understand as never before the pain
our fathers paid. I know the bitter animal war against environment,
evolution whipped into action by pain, hunger, fear of death, and I
shall carve that, all that, into the statue of one woman."

"And what of me, me and you as such, Claire and Lawrence, who were there
through that struggle in the wilderness?" The speech leaped from
somewhere in her being before she knew it, and with it came knowledge
that stung her into tearful self-hate.

"We shall go back to our old lives, I suppose, and live them out."

It was what she had expected him to say, yet the calm matter-of-fact
statement hurt her as nothing he had ever said before.

Lawrence dropped into the arm-chair again, and rested his head on his
hand. He was calmer now, and, reviewing in his mind what he had said, he
was beginning to ask himself why had he given way to this sudden
resentment against Claire. If she doubted him because he was blind, was
that any more than others had done? He had never burst out against them.
What was the matter with him? He surveyed the whole trend of his life up
to this minute: how he had broken at late adolescence from a glowing
idealist to a wanderer through varying paths of thought; always stirred,
stimulated, and swept on by contact with other people, books he had
read, women for whom he had occasional fancies of love, until gradually
he settled into his assured manner. It was exercise he needed, that and
work.

He asked himself if he seriously loved Claire, and answered
unequivocally that he did not. He wanted her friendship very much,
indeed, but love, not at all. If she had been single, perhaps--but no,
he did not care about her that way, that was all. He had been too long
shut up here in the cabin with her and without work. He must get some
wood and amuse himself carving things with Ortez's knife; it would be
good practise, and, at the same time, relieve his nerves. He was sorry
he had let himself go; Claire must not be hurt.

"Claire," he said quietly, "if I wounded you, if I said things I ought
not, pardon me! I am getting nervous doing nothing, and I am not myself
these days."

She laughed calmly. "Oh, very well!" she said. "I wonder that we don't
come to blows, cooped up here as we are. I think next time Philip makes
his rounds I'll go with him."

"It would be a good