os
into order and activity in the Garden Home; these were the reasons the
thing interested him and why he rather enjoyed seeing it springing up
about him. But these, he thought as he rode along, were not the reasons
the thing interested Mabel. And when he mentioned them to her.... And
when she, for her part, spoke of it to him--and she was always speaking
of it--the reasons for her enthusiasm retired him at once into a shell.
Funny state of affairs!

Mabel was convinced he loathed and detested the Penny Green Garden Home
Development; and actually he rather liked the Penny Green Garden Home
Development; and yet he couldn't tell her so; and she did not understand
in the least when he tried to tell her so. Funny--eight years ago this
month....

His thoughts went on. And, come to think of it, the relations between
them were precisely similar in regard to nearly everything they ever
discussed. And yet they would be called, and were, a perfectly happy
couple. Perfectly? Was every happy married couple just what they were?
Was married happiness, then, merely the negation of violent unhappiness?
Merely not beating your wife, and your wife not drinking or running up
debts? He thought: "No, no, there's something more in it than that." And
then his forehead wrinkled up in his characteristic habit and he
thought: "Of course, it's my fault. It isn't only this dashed Garden
Home. It's everything. It isn't only once. It's always. It can't
possibly be her fault always. It's mine. I can see that.

"Take this morning at breakfast. Perfectly good temper both of us. Then
she said, 'Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a
year; and, what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!'
Immediately I was riled. Why should I get riled because she says that
Mrs. Toller is going to take a house for eighty pounds a year? I just
rustled the newspaper. Why on earth couldn't I say, 'Good lord, is she?'
or something like that? Why on earth couldn't I even not rustle the
newspaper? She knows what it means when I rustle the paper. I meant her
to know. Why should I? It's the easiest thing on earth for me to respond
to what she says. I know perfectly well what she's getting at. I could
easily have said that Mrs. Toller would have old Toller in the workhouse
one of these days if he didn't watch it. I could have said, 'She'll be
keeping three servants next, and she can't keep one as it is.' Mabel
would have loved that. She'd have la