'Even so, Phillip, even so', she always murmured and would pat her hair with that distracted air of a woman who is not appeased or, if she is, has her mind elsewhere, though she will not acknowledge it.

'I cannot be other than myself any more than you can be other than yourself, she often said.

'And thus there is a vacuum where love should be', said I.

'No vacuum, Phillip, but rather an enclave of desire that will renew itself. I cannot help myself if love between my legs enchants me more than is in my head'.

'Impure!', I cried, but said it only in my head.

The words we spoke grew rougher through the years, the intervals between our kisses longer. Hiding our deceptions as we might before the children, we could never quite dissemble them. Words of parting rose, and Amy cried, clung to her mother. Richard, whose nineteen years I then relied upon to make him manly, would not speak to either of us, yet I saw him in the last week of their abiding here kiss his mother thrice, and once in fullness on her lips, whereat she threw her head back, stroked his hair.

I could not shout at them to stop. Such is the guile of circumstance that I would have been accused by her of 'being miserable'. Pretending not to see, I turned away. The hour was late. Amy and Sylvia were both in bed. Passing straight-backed, straight-legged, out of the room, I heard a succulence of mouths, yet chided myself and not them for impure thoughts. 'Darling', she called him, though had never called me more than 'dear'.

A whole hour passed before she came to bed that night, her nipples stiff. I saw them as she dropped her camisole. I wished to ask why she had stayed so late downstairs, but could not bring myself to ask. The bows of her drawers were all untied already, and they fell down loose, at which she turned towards the bed wherein I lay and asked, 'Do you not like me thus-not like me thus?'