cid,
unimaginative, tolerably stupid person, who had no stronger feeling for
them than the mild temporary affection they could excite in any one not
a monster. And the other fifth of it wasn't strictly a job at all.

On the whole, then, leaving their miraculous hours out of the
account--and, being incommensurable, imponderable, they couldn't be
included in an inventory--their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to
revisit Arcady, to seize a golden day that looked neither toward the
past nor toward the future, complete in itself, perfect--was a failure.

It was not until, pretty ruefully, they acknowledged this, tore up their
artificial resolution not to look at the future, and deliberately set
themselves to the contemplation of a life that would have to take into
account complex and baffling considerations, that their honeymoon became
a success. It was well along in their month that this happened.

Rose had spent a maddening sort of day, a day that had been all edges,
trying not to let herself feel hurt over fantastic secondary meanings
which it was possible to attach to some of the things Rodney had said,
frying to be cheerful and sensible, and to ignore the patent fact that
his cheerfulness was as forced and unnatural a thing as hers. The
children--as a rule the best-behaved little things in the world--had
been refractory. They'd refused to take their morning nap for some
reason or other, and had been fractious ever since. So, after their
supper, when they'd finally gone off to sleep, and Rose had rejoined
Rodney in the sitting-room, she was in a state where it did not take
much to set her off.

It was not much that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she
found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with
which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical,
and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done
things like that. If you found him sitting in a chair, you found him
reading a book. When he was thinking something out he tramped back and
forth, twisted his face up, made gestures! That habit couldn't have
changed. It was just that he wasn't being natural with her! Couldn't
feel at home with her! Before she knew it, she was crying.

He asked, in consternation, what the matter was. What had happened?

"Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. Really."

"Then it's just--that you're not happy. With me, like this." He brought
that out gravely