Kind Are Her Answers Read Free Page A

ask him to give her something from the dispensary after all. Perhaps he would guess then that he had upset her, without being told. He would be in bed, she supposed, by now. She had a sudden vivid picture of him, switching on the light half in his sleep as he did when a night call came, and sitting up with his fair hair silkily tangled and his pyjamas falling off—he was not an obviously restless sleeper, but always contrived partly to detach himself from his clothes. She remembered how his grey eyes darkened with sleep; his brows and lashes were a kind of tarnished-gilt colour, almost brown and did not disappear against his skin like those of most fair men. She had noticed them again to-night, while he was writing out the name of the book. Reaching again for the lightswitch she picked up the pad and looked at it; large round letters, not like his, as if he had been writing for a child. But she had always complained about his writing; illegibility, she maintained, was a form of bad manners.
    It would be tragic, she thought, for Kit to become coarsened and spoiled, as, if she lost her influence on him, he might. This was the first time she had thought explicitly that she might not hold him; he had always been so unalienably there. But to-night there had been a moment as he stood over her—tall, flexible like a boy with the kind of grace that is just over the border from awkwardness, smelling familiarly of Pears soap and toothpaste—when she had newly, piercingly imagined life without the certainty of him; the cold, dull reflection of herself that everything would give back without the interposition of his love; the dreadful narrowing of herself if he ceased to be an extension of her. She had wanted, for a moment, at any cost to keep him there, to find out what he was thinking about that made him so unlike himself, so sufficient and self-contained. But he had not understood, and that of course was best. Men ceased to respect you if you abandoned your reserve. She had always been careful about that.
    She sat up and turned her pillow, which felt hot and tumbled, and put out the light again. But she still found herself remembering his hair, soft and shining under her fingers, against her shoulder, and his sleepy weight for which, when she woke him, he would apologize. Perhaps last year, if she had pretended a little … but when she knew it could not give her a child she had hated it all. And he had said it should make no difference to his loving her. He had promised.
    What could have changed him? A suspicion began to grow on her that this deterioration was due to the influence of some one else. She had never cared very much, for instance, for his friend McKinnon. He belonged to the Left Book Club and was always bringing over their bleak, frightening books, which she hated, for Kit to read. He looked at her too in a way which made her feel sure he was cynical about women, no doubt because he knew the wrong ones. Did he ever introduce them to Kit? Kit was so simple about women, so naïvely generous in his judgements. He didn’t see through people.
    The hall clock struck twelve. She had been lying awake for more than half an hour. She wished she had not told Kit that she was sleeping better. Kit was forgetting, among McKinnon and his friends, how sensitive she was, how acutely she felt small coldnesses and failures in response that most women would never even notice. He had been so sympathetic when she was ill, sitting on the edge of the bed when she couldn’t sleep and talking and holding her hand. Perhaps if she were to be ill again—as she easily might be, with the cold weather ahead and all this worry—he might realize. She noticed, now, that her head was beginning to ache.
    Yes, it really was aching. She felt cold, too. She must not let herself be ill again, for Kit’s sake. She would ask him for the tablet after all. He would hardly be asleep yet. Or, if he were, he was so used to being called up that he would soon drop