She gave no sign that she heard him, but she continued to look at him. He felt that she was waiting for him to tell her what to do, and that she would do whatever he said. Her helplessness confounded him. He felt he could deal with her — after all, she was Rose, he knew her, she was his wife — but he could not deal with her helplessness. If he had put it into words he might have said, “I married Rose, not her helplessness,” as another man might have said, “I married her, not her family.” Hubert had seen Rose get that beaten look in her mother’s presence, but there was no need for any of that now, and he knew it would be a bad thing to encourage her in these moods. It would be bad for her. Her mother had warned him that Rose was inclined to brood over nothing at all. The thing to do was not to take her seriously and not to admit that there was anything wrong. There was nothing wrong. Hubert knew that the way to deal with Rose when she was in this frame of mind was not to comfort or coddle her but to distract her, and so instead of putting his arms around her, as he wanted to do, he said, “The shower will be over in a minute. Why don’t we forget about all this and go out for a little walk and talk about the nice house we’re going to have all to ourselves one of these days?”

The house they found was the one they lived in now. The linoleum on the floor in the back sitting room where Hubert sat had been there when they moved in, and they had paid extra for it. Before they moved into the house, they came out on the tram from Somerville Street one day and walked around the empty rooms they would soon be living in. One tour of the house was enough for Hubert, but Rose was reluctant to leave, so he sat down on the floor in the back sitting room, with his back to the wall under the window, and told her to look around to her heart’s content.