"I have said nothing for a fortnight because I have been married nine weeks, and I have already made you plant an orchard," said Hannah. "And I have got some sense of how much a man can be told at once."
He began to laugh, and then could not, because laughing was one of the things that did not go well. And he sat there with his hand on the table, getting his breath, while his wife watched him, and did not fuss, and did not look away.
That was the other thing, and it took her about a month to learn it, and about a year to be good at it. He had episodes—not often at first in her experience, about four times a month, at night mostly, sometimes in cold air. And the whole of Corvedale had spent eight years having a settled way of dealing with them, which was to be extremely calm and quiet, and to look at something else.
Hannah watched that happen twice, and then stopped doing it.
The third time, in the estate room in the autumn, when he had got up too quickly from a chair, she put her book down and looked directly at him for the whole of it—about four minutes—and did not say one word, and did not go and get anybody.
Afterward, he said, "You did not look away."
"No."
"Everybody looks away. My own man looks away. Trant has been looking at the fire for eight years."
"I know it," said Hannah Sedge. "I have watched them do it since I came, and I have thought about it a good deal, and I have decided that they do it out of kindness, and that it is the unkindest thing in this house. Because a man who is being looked away from is a man who has understood that what is happening to him is not to be acknowledged. And I did that to my great-aunt for four years, and I did it out of delicacy, and I have never once forgiven myself for it."