"Have I changed much?" he asked her later in the day, unable to hold in his curiosity.
The answer he half expected was that he had grown worldly-wise and rakish. The answer he got proved a shock to his vanity, for after a steady, testing regard, Rhoda told him he had changed in a way that made her want to mother him.
"You've lost your carefree smile," she said. "In its place you've got two little lines, and a sort of shadow, and the look of a man facing something grim. It's as if you were worried about something and don't know what."
You look so sad, honey,—Floss's plaint echoed in his brain. He had put it down to Floss's own excessive cheeriness that emphasized the contrast for her, but if it was apparent to Rhoda too, there must be just cause, and it oppressed him. For deep within himself he had wondered if he was a failure; and if you were a failure or were going to be, surely you would have the look of a man facing something grim! He longed to ask if his cheek still went the nice old way, but if he did, God alone knew what rivulets of mutual affection that would let loose, and with Olga curled up in his heart, and Rhoda, for all her bantering ways, so desperately sensitive without showing it, they might both go all to pieces right in the middle of Paris and never get properly put together again. The hardest problem in life, he reflected, is to know what to hold back and what not to.
