This amazing dependence Connie realised with a sort of horror. She heard him with his pit managers, with the members of his Board, with young scientists, and she was amazed at his shrewd insight into things, his power, his uncanny material power over what is called practical men. He had become a practical man himself, and an amazingly astute and powerful one, a master. Connie attributed it to Mrs. Bolton's influence upon him, just at the crisis in his life.
But this astute and practical man was almost an idiot when left alone to his own emotional life. He worshipped Connie, she was his wife, a higher being, and he worshipped her with a queer, craven idolatry, like a savage, a worship based on enormous fear, and even hate of the power of the idol, the dread idol. All he wanted was for Connie to swear, to swear not to leave him, not to give him away.
"Clifford," she said to him—but this was after she had the key to the hut—"Would you really like me to have a child one day?"
He looked at her with a furtive apprehension in his rather prominent pale eyes.
"I shouldn't mind, if it made no difference between us," he said.
"No difference to what?" she asked.
"To you and me; to our love for one another. If it's going to affect that, then I'm all against it. Why, I might even one day have a child of my own!"
She looked at him in amazement.
"I mean, it might come back to me one of these days."
She still stared in amazement, and he was uncomfortable.
"So you would not like it if I had a child?" she said.
"I tell you," he replied quickly, like a cornered dog, "I am quite willing, provided it doesn't touch your love for me. If it would touch that, I am dead against it."
Connie could only be silent in cold fear and contempt. Such talk was really the gabbling of an idiot. He no longer knew what he was talking about.
"Oh, it wouldn't make any difference to my feeling for you," she said, with a certain sarcasm.
"There!" he said. "That is the point! In that case I don't mind in the least. I mean it would be awfully nice to have a child running about the house, and feel one was building up a future for it,
