One day, Rosemary came alone. Ethel had been speaking more and more seriously of staying on permanently. Today she had gone looking around for jobs. To Mr.
Gibson's shock, Rosemary proposed to go job-hunting herself.
'After all,' she said, and she was standing on both feet, much as Ethel did, 'a substitute is going to finish off your year, Kenneth, and then it is summer. You are not the richest man in the world. . . . You shouldn't work at anything this summer, after these injuries. . . . And in spite of the insurance, you know we can't recover all the cost of all of this.' She looked very bleak for a moment. 'But there is no reason why I can't help. I'm well now ...'
She was well enough. She looked physically quite sound. He didn't know what made him fidget. He seemed to catch overtones of Ethel's briskness and practicality in Rosemary's voice . . . The new man in the right-hand bed was frankly listening to every word being said, and Mr. Gibson couldn't quite black out his own consciousness of this fact, either.
'A woman needn't be a parasite,' said Rosemary, 'unless, I suppose, she's married to some fabulous captain of industry who can afford a parasite . . .'
'Or likes them,' he murmured. 'Some men are old-fashioned.' He revised his thought, sternly. 'If you would enjoy a job,' he told her, 'of course, Rosemary. How... how is the garden?'
'All right, I guess.'
'Have you tried to paint the little wall?' He was groping back after something far away, the other side of the fog.
'No,' she said. 'I haven't. I could never be a painter, Kenneth. Just a dabbler. Ethel says, you know, people go in for things like that in retreat from reality, and I'm afraid I haven't been aware enough of the . . . well, the economic world . . . the commercial world . . . the real world.'
(Mr. Gibson thought to himself, Yes, this is Ethel. But it is good for her.)
'I guess I was more or les? sheltered for too long,' said Rosemary.
'We-ell . . .' he considered. 'I dunno as I would call it that.' A prison is a shelter, he was thinking, in a way. But . . .
'I see now,' she said vigorously. 'There was something too dreamy and not quite tough enough about the
way I let things go on. If I'd had more sense ... if I had faced up to facts ... I needn't have ever gotten into such a state as I was in . . .'
'As you were' he said admiringly. 'You sound like a very determined young woman now.'
'I am.' She smiled. The praise had pleased her. 'There are jobs I could do, now.'
'Yes.' He knew. Jobs for rude health. First stepping-stones toward working experience. 'Well,' he sighed, 'I never proposed to keep you wrapped in what the British call cotton wool . . . forever.' He looked at the detestable ceiling.
Curly-locks, curly-locks, wilt thou be mine?
he intoned . . .
Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine, But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, And feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream.
He'd made her laugh. (If the laugh was a bit artificial, a bit strained, perhaps this waT' because the man in the next bed was wearing such a look of shocked contempt on his whiskery face.)
'What an unbalanced diet!' cried Rosemary, attempting to be gay. '
'Much too rich and probably fattening,' Mr. Gibson agreed, looking drowsy. Covertly he inspected her new briskness. Was it real? Was it Rosemary? Was he wrong to so dislike it?
'Do you need more books?' she said suddenly. 'I wasn't sure . . .'
He squirmed his head. 'It's an effort to hold a book, I find,' he said miserably. 'Maybe I have had too steady a diet of poetry. When 'life is real, life is earnest'—and there I go.' His own smile felt somewhat artificial.
'Ethel has told me so much about you,' said his wife. 'How you always have helped people—'
'Oh, now . . .' he sputtered. He disliked this kind of pious judgment. Like everybody, he had only and ever tried to be comfortable.
'Just the same,' said Rosemary resolutely, 'Ethel and I are going to take care of you, for a change.'
(Mr. Gibson didn't like the sound of this, one bit. But, he thought, perhaps she needed to get rid of the burden of gratitude and if this was her way, he would have to bear it.) So he told her, willing his eyes to twinkle, that he fancied this would be delightful.
After she had gone he gave the back of his head to his curious neighbor, and mused on this meeting. Rosemary's vigor and resolution, he perceived, was a strain upon her. She was pressing herself to be something she had never been. But perhaps now needed to be? Well, if she needed to feel useful to him and this was her way, why, he must acquire the grace to receive.
He would just have to shuck off his §ense of dismay, the illogical notion that he had been receiving, formerly, and now lost something precious. If Rosemary saw duty, why, he should understand this. He had seen duty and enjoyed the doing of it, often enough. He must oblierate this baseless feeling that something . . . some hidden thing ... was very wrong within Rosemary. After all, he mused in sad whimsicality', if man cannot live by bread alone, neither can woman be satisfied by cream and strawberries.
He tried to keep from his old habit of quoting in his mind. Too many poems were about love. Maybe all of them. . . .
Mr. Gibson had a bit of a shock one day, when he discovered that some badly smashed bones in his thigh had grown back together somewhat awkwardly. Unless he wished to go through a series of attempts at bone-breaking and repairing that would be expensive (and no results guaranteed) he would be lame.
