And presently as she held him so in the quiet of his old room, with the house settling into drowsiness about them, and the sycamore tapping its friendly signal on the roof close above their heads, Joan's identity seemed to be slipping, merging, into that of some one else. She ceased to be Joan the girl. She felt, in that strange moment of transition, partly the wife, and partly the mother; but most of all the woman, whose mission is to give.
There is, among the wives and mothers of what the
Misses Darcy were wont to call the polite world, a general conspiracy of silence on the subject of honeymoons. The theory is allowed to go unchallenged that a honeymoon is invariably a period of bliss and romance unalloyed; the conspirators apparently subscribing to the ideas of the stoical parent who teaches his child to swim by throwing him unexpectedly into the water. If he manages to keep afloat, well and good; if he drowns, regrettable; if he comes out alive but with a shrinking cowardice with regard to water that never afterwards leaves him, perhaps it is no concern of his parent's. And again, perhaps it is.
Joan and Archibald Blair returned from their honeymoon not quite as close friends as when they embarked upon it. Joan's manner had gained a certain kindliness, a gentle consideration that was akin to sympathy; whereas Archie, with puzzled eyes and a smile that beamed rather uncertainly, almost evinced his desire to propitiate by rolling over at her feet and holding up four paws to heaven. (Which was no way to propitiate our heroine.)
Honeymoons, however, do not last indefinitely; and by the time Ellen Neal and her furniture and the results of Archie's "twigging" were moved into a certain modest house that simply cried aloud to be purchased (on the installment plan), Archie had grown almost accustomed to the sight of the One and Only seated at his breakfast table _en negligée_, pouring out his coffee, with a preoccupied word from him now and then as she glanced through the morning paper. (It was characteristic of that household that Joan was the one who read the morning paper.) He kissed her whenever he liked without asking leave; and in return she rumpled up his hair deliciously, and called him "Goose!", and reminded him to bring oranges from downtown because the neighboring grocery had such poor ones.