II
He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash in icy water was agony; to tramp for three hours through fluffy snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed to work twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experiment at its juiciest moment to creep home for dinner, of plunging with Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious as the indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them, and more civilized quarters.
With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and just a simple decent bathroom—
She had written, “You have been thoroughly beastly, and any attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather doubt, must come from you.”
He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.