Twilight Sleep
doctor says she ought to go off for a while by herself."
Wyant was slowly drawing at his pipe. At length he said: "Your mother's doctor told her that once; and she never came back."
Nona's colour rose through her pale cheeks to her very forchead. The motions of her blood were not impetuous, and she now felt herself blushing for having blushed. It was unlike Wyant to say that—unlike his tradition of reticence and decency, which had always joined with Pauline's breezy optimism in relegating to silence and non-existence whatever it was painful or even awkward to discuss. For years the dual family had lived on the assumption that they were all the best friends in the world, and the vocabulary of that convention had become their natural idiom.
Stanley Heuston seemed to catch the constraint in the air. He got up as if to go. "I suppose we're dining somewhere too—." He pronounced the "we" without conviction, for every one knew that he and his wife seldom went out together.
Wyant raised a detaining hand. "Don't go, Stan. Nona and I have no secrets—if we had, you should share them. Why do you look so savage,
Nona? I suppose I've said something stupid. . . Fact is, I'm old-fashioned; and this idea of people who've chosen to live together having perpetually to get away from each other. . . When I remember my father and mother, for sixty-odd years. . . New
