The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni

Now that he had worded aloud the idea of leaving Anne, the thought was always with him.

Spiritual freedom. He wished for no other. The man in the street might talk as if sex were a devouring hunger, a ravening wolf ready to spring upon one unexpectedly at any moment. But sex without companionship nauseated him to visualize. There might be moments -- these he would deal with when they arose. Now, the wind of spiritual freedom carried no taint of lesser, fiercer need.

How did Anne feel? Perhaps she, too, would welcome freedom. He had visioned restrictions binding him alone. Perhaps Anne, too, was bound.

The need to know consumed Roger's thought and his impatience with smaller issues. As one forgives trivial failings in the face of a great crisis, Roger grew strangely gentle and forbearing. He rarely left home in the evenings now, and Anne often felt his eyes on her questioningly, as she sat sewing under the lamp. For she rarely read; she so often forgot to turn the pages.

It was one evening, about three weeks after he had talked with Katya, that Roger looked up to see Anne almost immersed under a billow of white material. Usually Anne's work was something small and compact, and more than once he had traced fanciful analogies between the short, swift movements of Anne's needle, mending a jagged hole in a sock, and the mental methods of the world of Mitchells. It was with such little stabs that they attempted to draw together the holes of life, patch it for what? -- a few more wearings at best. But to-night, as if in keeping with the wonder of Anne's attitude to freedom, she was engaged on larger work.

He laid his book aside and asked with real interest:

"What's that?"

Anne started. They scarcely ever broke in on each other's occupations any more.

"A sheet."

"A sheet? Do you make sheets? I thought you bought them all ready."

"You do, if you want to throw away every one that gets a hole in it. But you can cut them in two -- they usually wear in the center -- and sew them up again and they're as good as new except for the seam."

Roger was disappointed. No doubt it was an excellent method, but it annoyed him. It was so vehemently sensible and frugal.

"It seems to me that's mending -- in extremis. If we need new sheets I wish you'd buy them."

"We don't need new sheets. These are for mamma. Hers are almost all gone."

Roger felt as if he were being quietly suffocated in an ocean of mended sheets. He sat looking at Anne until his eyes disturbed her beyond her power to pretend indifference. She glanced up, but before she could ask him why he was so interested in her sewing, Roger spoke.

"Anne," he said slowly, "why aren't things the same as they used to be between us?"

At last it had come, the thing that had been moving toward her for weeks. It had taken possession of her. The matter was no longer in her control.

"I don't know."

"Neither do I, when I try to put it into words."

Anne threaded her needle in the silence that followed and bent again over the hem. Bent so, with the light gilding to the cool fairness of her, Roger's clear-cut decision of the last few weeks clouded. Surely nothing so physically exquisite as Anne could be empty of beauty within.