Since her marriage, Clara, Maggie, and Auntie Hamps had been engaged in the pleasant endless task of telling her all about everything that related to the family, and she had been permitted to understand that Edwin, though utterly admirable, was not of a creative disposition, and that he had done nothing but conserve what his father had left. Without his father Edwin "would have been in a very different position." She believed this. Every day, indeed, Edwin, by the texture of his hourly life, proved the truth of it.... All the persons standing to make a profit out of the new project would get the better of his fine ingenuous temperament--naturally! She knew the world. Did Edwin suppose that she did not know what the world was? ... And then the interminable worry of the new enterprise--misgivings, uncertainties, extra work, secret preoccupations! What room for love, what hope of tranquillity in all that? He might argue---- But she did not want to argue; she would not argue. She was dead against the entire project. He had not said to her that it was no affair of hers, but she knew that such was his thought, and she resented the attitude. No affair of hers? When it threatened her felicity? No! She would not have it. She was happy and secure. And while lying luxuriously back in her lounge she would maintain all the defences of her happiness and her security.
Holding the green book in front of her, Edwin said quietly:
"_I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained._
_I stand and look at them long and long._
_They do not sweat and whine about their condition._
_They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins._
_They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God._
_Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things._
_Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago._
_Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth._"
Edwin had lately been exciting himself, not for the first time, over Walt Whitman.
"Fine, isn’t it?" he said, sure that she would share his thrill.
"Magnificent!" she agreed with quiet enthusiasm. "I must read more of that." She gazed over the top of the book through the open blue-curtained window into the garden.