“Nonsense!”
“Quite right. It is nonsense.”
“Now you get up off the cold floor, or you’ll be starting rheumatism next, and you stop laughing and being so silly.”
“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” he asked, pinning her with his elbows, and advancing his face to hers. “What’s there to cry at? Kiss me here.” He indicated the spot where a kiss would be welcome.
He was a boy after all. When it came to the point, it was she who remembered the past, she into whose soul the iron had entered, she who knew whose room this had been last year. It endeared him to her strangely that he should be sometimes wrong.
“Any letters?” he asked.
“Just a line from Freddy.”
“Now kiss me here; then here.”
Then, threatened again with rheumatism, he strolled to the window, opened it (as the English will), and leant out. There was the parapet, there the river, there to the left the beginnings of the hills. The cabdriver, who at once saluted him with the hiss of a serpent, might be that very Phaethon who had set this happiness in motion twelve months ago. A passion of gratitude—all feelings grow to passions in the South—came over the husband, and he blessed the people and the things who had taken so much trouble about a young fool. He had helped himself, it is true, but how stupidly!
All the fighting that mattered had been done by others—by Italy, by his father, by his wife.