he worked, her mind
full of busy thoughts.

Chiefly, as she went over their situation, she felt guilty to think how
entirely apart from him all her real life was passed. The doubts, the
racking spiritual changes, that had come to her, she had kept all to
herself; and yet she could say honestly that her silence had been
involuntary, instinctive, she fancied whimsically, like the reticence as
to emotions that one keeps in the hurly-burly of a railway station. With
tickets to be bought and trunks to be checked and time-tables to be
consulted, it is absurd to try to communicate to a busy and preoccupied
companion inexplicable qualms of soul-sickness. Any sensible woman--and
Lydia, like most American women, had been trained by precept and example
to desire above all things to be sensible and not emotionally
troublesome to the men of her family--any sensible woman kept her
thoughts to herself till the time came when she could talk them over
without interfering with the business on hand.

As she lay on the sofa and watched Paul's face sharpen in his
concentration, it occurred to her that the point of the whole matter was
that for her and Paul the suitable and leisurely time for mutual
discussion had never come. That was all! That was the whole trouble! It
was not any inherent lack of common feeling between them. Simply, there
was always business on hand with which she must not interfere.

Paul lifted his head, his eyes half closed in a narrowed, speculative
gaze upon some knotty point in his calculation. This long, sideways look
happened to fall upon Lydia, and she turned cold before the profound
unconsciousness of her existence in those eyes apparently fixed so
piercingly upon her. She had a quick fancy that the blank wall of
abstraction at which that vacant stare was directed really and palpably
separated her husband from her.

For a moment she wondered if she were growing like the women she had
heard her father so unsparingly condemn--silly, childish, egotistic
women who could not bear to have their husbands think of anything but
themselves, who were jealous of the very business which earned them and
their children a living. She acquitted herself of this charge proudly.
She did not want all of Paul's time; she wanted only some of it. And
then, it was not to have him thinking of her, but with her about the
common problems of their life; it was to think with him about the
problems of his life; it was to have him help her