He has aged, Nettie thought. Just now, looking into his face—which was, curiously, more familiar to her than anyone else’s—she had found nothing to stir her. One might say that he was faded, as one would say it of a woman. He would soon be fifty. He had a fretful, touchy air about him. During lunch, when she had laughed at his impatience, he had replied primly (here in her mind she pulled a long, solemn, comic face): “I have my faults, I suppose, like everyone else.” And like everyone else, she noted, he was willing to admit the general probability so long as no specific instance was brought to his attention. He made little announcements about himself, too, protesting his tolerance, his sincerity. “I am a sensitive person,” he had declared, absolutely out of the blue (something, anyway, that no truly sensitive person would say). He was so cautious—anyone would think he had a thousand years to live and didn’t need to invite experience. And while, of course, any marriage must involve compromise (and who, indeed, would know that better than she?), that was no reason for Clem and May to behave toward one another like a couple of … civil servants.

She could acknowledge his intelligence. And he had always been a very competent person. Wrecked on a desert island, for instance (one of her favorite criteria), he would have known what to do. But life demanded more, after all, than the ability to build a fire without matches, or recognize the breadfruit tree on sight. And one could hardly choose to be wrecked simply in order to have an opportunity for demonstrating such accomplishments.

Strange that he should have aged like this in so short a time—it would be precisely eight years in June since they parted. It was still a thing she couldn’t bring herself to think of, the sort of thing people had in mind when they said, not quite laughing, that they wouldn’t want their youth over again. Oddly enough, it was the beginning, not the end, that didn’t bear thinking about. One weekend, they had stopped at a bar, in the country, on the way to this house. It was summer, and their drinks came with long plastic sticks in them. Clem had picked up one of the sticks and traced the outline of her fingers, lying flat on the Formica tabletop. They had not said anything at all, then, but she had known simply because he did that. Even now, the thought of his drawing that ridiculous plastic stick around her fingers was inexpressibly touching.