Both were
rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them,
right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an
unaccountable vein of childishness. She'd never been willing to call it
by that name in Rodney. But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she
wondered. Was that just the man of it? Were they all like that; at least
all the best of them? Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in
the role of--mother? The thought all but suffocated her.
She did not return Galbraith's confidences with any detailed account of
her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed
to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself. But she had a
comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go
on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew
infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to
time she had told Alice a good deal.
Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green
over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into
the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst
at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies.
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