It was for Sam and for Colonel Tom a
time of big dividends, mechanical progress, and contentment.
Sam stayed diligently at work in the offices and in the shops, but kept
within himself a reserve of strength and resolution that might have gone
into the work. With Sue he took up golf and morning rides on horseback,
and with Sue he sat during the long evenings, reading aloud, absorbing her
ideas and her beliefs. Sometimes for days they were like two children,
going off together to walk on country roads and to sleep in country
hotels. On these walks they went hand in hand or, bantering each other,
raced down long hills to lie panting in the grass by the roadside when
they were out of breath.
Near the end of the first year she told him one night of the realisation
of their hopes and they sat through the evening alone by the fire in her
room, filled with the white wonder of it, renewing to each other all the
fine vows of their early love-making days.
Sam never succeeded in recapturing the flavour of those days. Happiness is
a thing so vague, so indefinite, so dependent on a thousand little turns
of the events of the day, that it only visits the most fortunate and at
rare intervals, but Sam thought that he and Sue touched almost ideal
happiness constantly during that time.
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