And suddenly the whole scope of her daring flashed upon me. At twenty-eight she had failed to get him. Now, at forty, she would not scruple to make use of whatever arts she had since acquired.
_She would, if she could, marry Derwent Rose._
I cannot tell you my stupefaction at my own discovery. It was wellnigh with awe that I looked at her. For in that case her adventure was hardly less tremendous than his own. That is what I meant when I said that he began to constrain us and to draw us into the wheel of his own destiny. To marry a man of diminishing age! To marry a man who had lately been forty-five, was now at some unknown point in the neighbourhood of the thirties, and would presently miraculously re-attain adolescence! What unheard-of marriage was this?
As if she enumerated something to herself, one slender finger-tip was on another. "First I shall go with him to the blacksmith's about those rods," she said softly.
I avoided her gaze. "I don't know," I said, "that I want an incinerator built."
"But Derry wants to build it," she answered, as if that settled the question.
"He may have forgotten all about it to-morrow."
Swiftly she turned on me. "What do you mean by that?"
"The plain meaning of the words--he may have forgotten."
"Do you mean something about his memory?"
"Which memory? He's two of them--so far."
"Tch!... You just this moment said that he was deliberately putting things away from him because this was a holiday. Did you say that just to keep me quiet? Don't you believe it yourself?"
"I neither believe nor disbelieve. I simply don't know."
"Oh, you're tiresome!... In plain English, then: are you suggesting that when he came to me this morning, the only reason he didn't mention my note was that he had forgotten all about it in the night?"
I shrugged my shoulders. It all happened in the night. That was why he went to bed early. That was why I had given him a spirit-kettle for tea--or shaving. Something might have happened during the night of which she spoke. Something might be happening in my house at that very moment.
"_Do_ you mean his memory's cracking up?" she demanded.
"By getting him to talk about his book. To write that book he must draw on both his memories, experiences, or whatever you like to call it. That's his whole equipment for it--two conscious experiences, with himself balanced in the middle making the most of both. We might find out that way."