He'd get her a hired girl this time and let her have her own head
about things. She'd made it all right once, why not again? The
settledness of their habitual neutrality? What of it? He would
ignore that. It wasn't as if he had to court her, make
explanations. She was his wife. He didn't love her, never had,
never would, but life was too short to be overly fastidious. It
was flying, flying --in a few more years he would be fifty.
Fifty! And what had it all been about, anyway? He did have this
farm to show for his work--he had not made a bad job of that, he
and his Rag-weed. In her own fashion she was a good sort, and
better looking than most women past forty.

Rose felt the closeness of his scrutiny, sensed the unusual
cordiality of his mood, but from the depths of her hardly won
wisdom took no apparent notice of it. She knew well enough how
not to annoy him. If only she had not learned too late! What was
it about Martin, she wondered afresh, that had held her through
all these deadening years? Her love for him was like a stream
that, disappearing for long periods underground, seemed utterly
lost, only to emerge again unexpectedly, cleared of all past
murkiness, tranquil and deep.

This unspoken converging of minds, equivocal though it was on
Martin's part, resulted gradually in a more friendly period. Rose
always liked to remember that winter, with its peace that
quenched her thirsty heart and helped to blur the recollection of
old unkindnesses long since forgiven, but still too vividly
recalled. When, a year later, Billy was born, she was swept up to
that dizzy crest of rapture which, to finely attuned souls, is
the recompense and justification of all their valleys.