Carl had changed, Alexandra felt, much less than one might have expected. He had not become a trim, self-satisfied city man. There was still something homely and wayward and definitely personal about him. Even his clothes, his Norfolk coat and his very high collars, were a little unconventional.
He seemed to shrink into himself as he used to do; to hold himself away from things, as if he were afraid of being hurt. In short, he was more self-conscious than a man of thirty-five is expected to be.
He looked older than his years and not very strong. His black hair, which still hung in a triangle over his pale forehead, was thin at the crown, and there were fine, relentless lines about his eyes.
His back, with its high, sharp shoulders, looked like the back of an over-worked German professor off on his holiday. His face was intelligent, sensitive, unhappy. That evening after supper, Carl and Alexandra were sitting by the clump of castor beans in the middle of the flower garden.
The gravel paths glittered in the moonlight, and below them the fields lay white and still. 'Do you know, Alexandra,' he was saying, 'I’ve been thinking how strangely things work out.
I’ve been away engraving other men’s pictures, and you’ve stayed at home and made your own. ' He pointed with his cigar toward the sleeping landscape. 'How in the world have you done it? How have your neighbors done it?
' 'We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself.
It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so