id. "I'm not in the
mood for it for some reason. I can't say what I want to say."

"Cassandra won't know if it's well written or badly written," Katharine
remarked.

"I'm not so sure about that. I should say she has a good deal of
literary feeling."

"Perhaps," said Katharine indifferently. "You've been neglecting my
education lately, by the way. I wish you'd read something. Let me choose
a book." So speaking, she went across to his bookshelves and began
looking in a desultory way among his books. Anything, she thought, was
better than bickering or the strange silence which drove home to her the
distance between them. As she pulled one book forward and then another
she thought ironically of her own certainty not an hour ago; how it had
vanished in a moment, how she was merely marking time as best she could,
not knowing in the least where they stood, what they felt, or whether
William loved her or not. More and more the condition of Mary's mind
seemed to her wonderful and enviable--if, indeed, it could be quite
as she figured it--if, indeed, simplicity existed for any one of the
daughters of women.

"Swift," she said, at last, taking out a volume at haphazard to settle
this question at least. "Let us have some Swift."

Rodney took the book, held it in front of him, inserted one finger
between the pages, but said nothing. His face wore a queer expression of
deliberation, as if he were weighing one thing with another, and would
not say anything until his mind were made up.

Katharine, taking her chair beside him, noted his silence and looked at
him with sudden apprehension. What she hoped or feared, she could not
have said; a most irrational and indefensible desire for some assurance
of his affection was, perhaps, uppermost in her mind. Peevishness,
complaints, exacting cross-examination she was used to, but this
attitude of composed quiet, which seemed to come from the consciousness
of power within, puzzled her. She did not know what was going to happen
next.

At last William spoke.

"I think it's a little odd, don't you?" he said, in a voice of detached
reflection. "Most people, I mean, would be seriously upset if their
marriage was put off for six months or so. But we aren't; now how do you
account for that?"

She looked at him and observed his judicial attitude as of one holding
far aloof from emotion.

"I attribute it," he went on, without waiting for her to answer, "to the
fact that neither of us is in