l; "I was only thinking what a dear you are.
You're so sporting about everything. And I--sometimes in the middle of
being happy everything seems suddenly empty and stupid to me, and I
dread your finding that out. Arid spaces.... I don't know how to explain
it. They'll come even in my love for you."

Georgie nodded again, like a wise baby mandarin, as she sat there with
her feet tucked up under her. She stared ahead, and slowly a change came
over her face, a change like the suffusion of dawn. She caught his head
to her and drew it to her breast.

"I've had nothing to make me tired yet, not like you. I almost want you
to feel tired and sad and lost if it'll make you come to me, like
this...." She stroked his hair gently, holding his head very lightly. He
pressed it hard against her; he could feel her heart beating at his ear;
he rubbed his cheek against her breast. "You make me feel like a child
again," he said. "No one has ever done, that...."

"Do you know," said Georgie, still stroking rhythmically, "that every
woman wants her husband to be four things--her lover, her comrade, her
child, and her master? Did you know that?"

"No; I think I thought it was only the lover they cared about. I'm very
ignorant, Georgie! Have I to be all that? D'you think I can?"

"Which of them do you doubt?" asked Georgie slyly.

"Sometimes the lover, sometimes the comrade, sometimes the child, and
always the master, though I'll play at even that if you want me to. But
the other three--I shall always be all of them underneath, even in the
dry spaces."

Georgie slowly kissed his ruffled head, and then started to try and tie
the longer hairs on the crown into tight knots. He twisted his head away
and sat up, laughing. "If that's how you're going to treat me when I'm
being your child," he threatened, "I'll--"

"You'll what?" asked Georgie.

Ishmael did precisely what every other lover in the world would have
done in answer to that question at that moment. Later, when the sun had
moved high and they scrambled up to go home, Georgie was the laughing
child again; only for a second, as they stood on the ridge above and
looked down to the silvery patch where the bright grass was flattened
where they had lain, she wore the look that had transfigured her before.

In the early autumn Ishmael married, and a new phase began for him at
Cloom. For the first years his precision of them held very true, except
that, though they held more of deep an