l sorts of times, and in all sorts of places when they were
alone together, the great battle was renewed; mostly through the dead
hours of the night, in Rose's bedroom, she sitting up in bed, he
tramping up and down, shivering and shuddering in a big bath-robe. It
had a horrible way of interrupting itself for small domestic
commonplaces, which in their assumption of the permanency of their old
life, their blind disregard of the impending disaster, had an almost
unendurable poignancy. A breakfast on the morning of an execution is
something like that.

The hardest thing about it all for Rose--the thing that came nearest to
breaking down her courage--was to see how slowly Rodney came to realize
it at all. He was like a trapped animal pacing the four sides of his
cage confident that in a moment or two he would find the way out, and
then, incredulously, dazedly, coming to the surmise that there was no
way out. She really meant to go away and leave him--leave the babies; go
somewhere where his care and protection could not reach her! She was
actually planning to do it--planning the details of doing it! By the end
of one of their long talks, it would seem to her he had grasped this
monstrous intention and accepted it. But before the beginning of the
next one, he seemed to manage somehow to dismiss the thing as an
impossible nightmare.

An invitation came in from the Crawfords for a dance at the Blackstone,
the fifth of December, and he said something about accepting it.

"I shan't be here then, Roddy, you know," she said.

He went completely to pieces at that, as if the notion of her going away
had never really reached his mind before.

The struggle ranged through the widest possible gamut of moods. They had
their moments of rapturous love--passionate attempts at self-surrender.
They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had
been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about
themselves. They had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing,
around and around in circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each
other, getting nowhere. They had moments of incandescent anger.

He tried, just once, early in the fight, to take the ground he had taken
once before; that she was irresponsible, obsessed. There was a fracture
somewhere, as James Randolph's jargon had it, in her unconscious mind.
She didn't let him go far with that. He saw her blaze up in a splendid
burst of wrath, as she had