Her elbows on the window sill, she stared up at the star. Monday, she thought. Monday I shall have something else to think about. Just as Charles does. This dreadful mulling over words and looks, hanging on the wave of an eyelash. That's what women do, poor fools, trying to keep all the first glamor. Love. She heard the water gulping out of the tub. Love needs to be back of your days, _there_, but not the thing you feed on every second. Terrible indigestion, eating your heart out forever. Ugh, the sill was gritty with dust. She rubbed her elbows resentfully. That song Charles had hummed in the kitchen had sent her back through the years. She hadn't wanted anything else in those days. Passion, its strange, erratic light making everything else seem tinsel. Tenderness, making all else in life seem cold. And quarrels--the still, white silence, swift product of some unexpected moment, so that you felt yourself imprisoned in an iceberg, from which you never could escape--that was part of the struggle of admitting another person, your lover, into yourself. And child-bearing. Peculiar, ecstatic, difficult; commonplace physical preoccupation for long stretches of your life. Catherine shrugged. Perhaps, if you weren't husky--she twisted from her cramped position--perhaps some women never got over childbirth. It did eat you up. Her mother would say she was thinking too much. She rose, stretching her arms above her head, the silk slipping away from them. Then, as she heard Charles scuffling along the hall--he did need some new slippers--suddenly her heart opened and poured a golden flood over her being. Why, now, this instant, she loved him, and all the earlier passion was a thin tinkle against this sound--sunlight in the wide branches of a tree, and cold earth deep about the roots, and liquid sap flowing.
Her fingers closed about the crisp curtain edge as Charles pushed open the door.
"You in bed?" His whisper was cautious. "Oh, no." He snapped on the light, while Catherine gazed at him, waiting. His pink pajama coat flopped open.
"There isn't a damned button on the thing. Got a pin?" He shuffled across to the dressing table. "My wife's been to the country."
"Poor boy." Catherine rushed to the sewing table in the corner. "I'll sew 'em on if your wife won't." Ridiculous, enchanting. She pulled him down beside her on the bed, seized the coat, burying her knuckles against the hard warmth of his chest. "Don't wriggle, or you'll have it sewed to your diaphragm."