ither hot nor cold, without the primal
hunger to reach out and possess what we too timidly desired. We were
more neutral even than Ferdinand and the Lady of the Bust, for we no
longer cared sufficiently to let the other know we cared, but waited
and waited in that twilight where all cats are gray.

There was, mercifully, very little time left for us before the train
came in. We kept our masks on, and talked only of every-day things,
about the receipt for the ranch taxes and what steers Whinnie should
"finish" and the new granary roof and the fire-lines about the
haystacks. Without quite knowing it, when the train pulled in, I put
my arm through my husband's--and for the second time that evening he
turned sharply and inspected my face. I felt as though I wanted to
hold him back, to hold him back from something unescapable but
tragically momentous. I think he felt sorry for me. At any rate, after
he had swung his suit-case up on the car-platform, he turned and
kissed me good-by. But it was the sort of kiss one gets at funerals.
It left me standing there watching the tail-lights blink off down the
track, as desolate as though I had been left alone on the deadest
promontory of the deadest planet lost in space. I stood there until
the lights were gone. I stood there until the platform was empty again
and my car was the only car left along the hard-packed cinders. So I
climbed into the driving-seat, and pulled on my gauntlets, and headed
for home....

Back at Casa Grande I found Dinkie and Whinnie beside the bunk-house
stove, struggling companionably through the opening chapters of
_Treasure Island_. My boy smiled up at me, for a moment, but his
mind, I could see, was intent on the page along which Whinnie's
stubbled finger was crawling like a plowshare beside each furrow of
text. He was in the South Pacific, a thousand miles away from me. In
my own house Struthers was putting a petulant-voiced Poppsy to bed,
and Gershom, up in his room, was making extraordinary smells at his
chemistry experiments. Susie I found curled comfortably up in front of
the fire, idling over my first volume of _Jean Christophe_.

She read three sentences aloud as I sat down beside her. "How happy he
is! He is made to be happy!...Life will soon see to it that he is
brought to reason."

She seemed to expect some comment from me, but I found myself with
nothing to say. In fact, we both sat there for a long time, staring in
silence at the fire.

"