Hannah Sedge stood at that open window. "It would mean you have thrown away eight years," she said.
Nicholas Ware put both hands over his face.
"And that is exactly why nobody has ever asked you," said Hannah, "including you. And I have been four months working out that the reason nobody in this house asks that question is not delicacy at all: it is that the answer might be unbearable."
He would not do it for nine weeks.
Hannah never pressed him. That was deliberate, and it was the hardest piece of self-command she exercised in the whole of that marriage, and she wrote about it in her own book in the January in four lines:
I have said it once at four in the morning, and I am not going to say it again. If I ask him a second time, then it becomes a thing I want, and he will do it for me, and if the answer is bad he will have done it for me. It has got to be his, and I am watching a man decide whether to find out, and it is going to take him weeks, and there is nothing whatever I can do about it.
He went around the whole of it about four times, and she watched him do it without ever once being asked her opinion. What she saw was a man who could not be argued into it, and could not be argued out of it; who would be perfectly ordinary for four days, and then would be silent through an entire dinner; and who twice got as far as saying, "About Pell—" and then did not go on.
And in the last week of January, he said at the estate room table, between one thing and another, "I have written to Ambrose Pell."
Hannah put down her knife. "Have you?"