This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck Page B

night?
    “What a long day!” he said. “When I can’t get home to lunch, it’s awful!”
    But for her the day had gone like a gust of wind. She thought, her face buried in his neck, “Today is a blank in our life.” She had not lived it with him at all. She did not want to live a day without him. She must stay closely knit to him. She lifted her head impetuously. “Mark,” she cried, “please, please, I want a baby!”
    “Well, of all things!” said Mark, astounded. He stared at her, touched, smiling a little. “What a girl you are!” he said unsteadily. Then he laughed. “Anyway, let’s wait until after supper!” he said.
    “Grand supper,” he said, and leaning back, he filled his pipe. “Let’s go out on the porch.”
    They went out and found a new moon hanging over the wood, and they sat down in the light of it. He took one of the two new wicker chairs, but she sat on the top step and leaned her head against his knee. The moon was so sharply bright it dimmed the lights of the houses. He bent and turned her head suddenly so that the light of the moon fell full upon it.
    “What made you cry out to me that you wanted a baby?” he asked abruptly.
    She shook her head. “I don’t know—perhaps Lucile’s baby. I held her a little while today and she curled into my arm.”
    He smoothed back her hair. “Lucile has made me afraid to let you have one,” he said. “Hal is so worried by the way she feels. He says both their children were accidents. Tommy came before Lucile was ready. They had decided not to until he could afford a maid. I can’t—yet, you know, Susan. You’ve got to be sure—”
    “I wouldn’t let whether we had a maid or not decide what I want in my life,” she said quietly. He did not answer but she could hear the deep puff of his pipe. His big steady hand smoothed her hair and touched her neck. They were very close, so close that she nearly said, “I modeled a little baby today, Mark—perhaps that—” But before she could say it he spoke.
    “Sometimes I wonder why you married me,” he said. The old hateful humility was thick in his voice.
    “Mark!” She turned instantly. “I love you.”
    “I can’t see why,” he said wistfully. “I’m a very common sort of fellow.”
    “You’re not!” she cried.
    “Yes, I am,” he said. “This street’s full of fellows like me—Hal, Tom Page, Bob Shaplin—we’re all off the same piece.”
    “Oh, don’t,” she said. “You’re not a bit like them.”
    “We’re all good honest hard-working fellows and we’ll be nothing more when we die. I’ll be just like my dad—worrying along in the same little house on the farm he and Mother began with, always expecting to be better off, but never being so. We’re all the same. Hal said today as fast as he got a raise—”
    “But if I love you? And I don’t love Hal and Tom and Bob—”
    “I don’t see why you love me—you’re different—you’re not like Lucile and—”
    “I’m not different! I’m just the same. I don’t want to be different!”
    “You can’t help it.”
    “Oh, don’t—don’t—it makes me so lonely—”
    She put her arms about his knees and held to him. No, now she would not tell him how the day had gone. She would never tell him.
    “Let’s have a little baby,” she whispered. “I don’t want anyone to help me. I don’t have half enough to do. I want to be busy.”
    “Do you mean—now?” he asked. She could feel his hand trembling on her neck.
    “Yes,” she whispered, and held his hand on her throat with both of hers. She could feel her heart throbbing there against his palm. “Now—now—” she whispered.
    He waited a few minutes. He bent over her, looking at her. She looked into his young angular face, all lines and planes in the moonlight. He did not speak, and she waited in his silence, a long time, turning her head away, gazing into the dark wood beyond. Then suddenly he rose and drew her to her feet, and his arm about