not want Osborn.

CHAPTER XXI

HOME-COMING

Osborn Kerr was coming home with the happy sense of expectancy which
is common to the wanderer. He had prepared for departure with a high
heart and a holiday feeling running through everything, like
champagne, but he packed for his return with a very warm pleasure in
looking forward to the welcome waiting for him, right across all that
space, in the flat an which he had established home.

Looking back as well as forward, only the pleasant and sweet things of
his marriage remained impressed on his mind. The cosiness of the home
and not the worry of paying for it instalment by instalment; the good
dinners Marie cooked, not the grudge of giving out that housekeeping
allowance which paid for them; the prettiness and sunniness of his
wife rather than the faded looks and uncertain temper of the last few
years; the three fine kids he'd got, not the nuisance and noise and
expense which he had so often declared them.

The rosy cloud of time and distance had rolled between Osborn and all
that was his at No. 30 Welham Mansions. Before his year of adventure
was up he found himself thinking of them sentimentally; he found that
they were embedded pretty deep in his heart. They were real; other
things were--

Looking about for a definition, he stigmatised other things: "They're
trash."

He added therefore a postscript to his letter to his wife, an addition
written in a sudden thrust of pathos, a want of her almost like the
old want:

"I wonder if you've missed me, old girl."

In the trash he felt, though he had not given the idea the form of a
thought, that Roselle Dates was included. She had never bored, being
too clever in her stupid, instinctive way for that; but sometimes she
had sickened him. She had wanted so much. She seemed always wanting
something. At first her pallid and raven beauty and her clever
silliness had been sheer stimulation, but when you grew used to
her....

She had nothing behind. And she was mean with the sex meanness, the
cold prudence of the sex-trafficker. She would never have given; she
would only have sold, and that at a price far beyond Osborn Kerr's
pocket-book even at its recent splendour. But she did not want to sell
either; she wanted to take and take, to squeeze and squeeze.
Once--that was in San Francisco, where she had beaten together a
concert party and shone as its brightest star--when he had been
disappointed of a big deal and h