"That's good."

"But you're not!"

"No?"

"No!"

"Oh!"

Silence fell. Sam was feeling hurt and bewildered. He could not
understand her mood. He had come up expecting to be soothed and
comforted and she was like a petulant iceberg. Cynically, he recalled
some lines of poetry which he had had to write out a hundred times on
one occasion at school as a punishment for having introduced a white
mouse into chapel.

"Oh, woman in our hours of ease,
Un-something, something, something, please.
When tiddly-umpty umpty brow,
A something, something, something, thou!"

He had forgotten the exact words, but the gist of it had been that
woman, however she might treat a man in times of prosperity, could be
relied on to rally round and do the right thing when he was in trouble.
How little the poet had known women.

"Why not?" he said huffily..

She gave a little sob.