Part 29 (1/2)

”Well, she's fatter, but it's becoming to her. It makes her look softer.

She's a bit coa.r.s.e, but she tells a capital story. I always liked Abby.”

”Yes, I always liked Abby, too,” answered Virginia, and it was on the tip of her tongue to add that Abby had always liked Oliver. ”If he hadn't seen me, perhaps he might have married her,” she thought, and the remote possibility of such bliss for poor defrauded Abby filled her with an incredible tenderness. She would never have believed that bouncing, boisterous Abby Goode could have aroused in her so poignant a sympathy.

He appeared so much more cheerful than she had seen him since his disastrous trip to New York, that, moved by an unselfish impulse of grat.i.tude towards the cause of it, she put out her hand to him, while he raised his arm to extinguish the light.

”I am so glad about the horse, dear,” she said. ”It will be nice for you to go sometimes with Abby.”

”Why couldn't you come too, Jinny?”

”Oh, I shouldn't have time--and, besides, I gave it up long ago. I don't think a mother has any business on horseback.”

”All the same I wish you wouldn't let yourself go to pieces. What have you done to your hands? They used to be so pretty.”

She drew them hastily away, while the tears rose in a mist to her eyes.

It was like a man--it was especially like Oliver--to imagine that she could clean up half a house and take charge of three children, yet keep her hands as white and soft as they had been when she was a girl and did nothing except wait for a lover. In a flash of memory, she saw the reddened and knotted hands of her mother, and then a procession of hands belonging to all the mothers of her race that had gone before her. Were her own but a single pair in that chain of pathetic hands that had worked in the exacting service of Love?

”It is so hard to keep them nice,” she said; but her heart cried, ”What do my hands matter when it is for your sake that I have spoiled them?”

With her natural tendency to undervalue the physical pleasures of life, she had looked upon her beauty as a pa.s.sing bloom which would attract her lover to the veiled wonders of her spirit. Fleshly beauty as an end in itself would have appeared to her as immoral a cult as the wilful pursuit of a wandering desire in the male.

”I never noticed until to-night what pretty hands Abby has,” he said, innocently enough, as he turned off the gas.

A strange sensation--something which was so different from anything she had ever felt before that she could not give it a name--pierced her heart like an arrow. Then it fled as suddenly as it had come, and left her at ease with the thought: ”Abby has had nothing to hurt her hands.

Why shouldn't they be pretty?” But not for Abby's hands would she have given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel.

”She used to have a beautiful figure,” she said with perfect sincerity.

”Well, she's got it still, though she's a trifle too large for my taste.

You can't help liking her--she's such jolly good company, but, somehow, she doesn't seem womanly. She's too fond of sport and all that sort of thing.”

His ideal woman still corresponded to the type which he had chosen for his mate; for true womanliness was inseparably a.s.sociated in his mind with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of s.e.xual selection in the men of his race. Though he enjoyed Abby, he refused stubbornly to admire her, since evolution, which moves rapidly in the development of the social activities, had left his imagination still sacredly cheris.h.i.+ng the convention of the jungle in the matter of s.e.x. He saw woman as dependent upon man for the very integrity of her being, and beyond the divine fact of this dependency, he did not see her at all. But there was nothing sardonic in his point of view, which had become considerably strengthened by his marriage to Virginia, who shared it. It was one of those mental att.i.tudes, indeed, which, in the days of loose thinking and of hazy generalizations, might have proved its divine descent by its universality. Oliver, his Uncle Cyrus, the rector, and honest John Henry, however they may have differed in their views of the universe or of each other, were one at least in accepting the historical dogma of the supplementary being of woman.

And yet, so strange is life, so inexplicable are its contradictions, there were times when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a pa.s.sion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent of his imagination. As a wife, Virginia was perfect; as a mental companion, she barely existed at all. She was, he had come to recognize, profoundly indifferent to the actual world. Her universe was a fiction except the part of it that concerned him or the children. He had never forgotten that he had read his play to her one night shortly after Jenny's birth, and she had leaned forward with her chin on her palm and a look in her face as if she were listening for a cry which never came from the nursery. Her praise had had the sound of being recited by rote, and had aroused in him a sense of exasperation which returned even now whenever she mentioned his work. In the days of his courts.h.i.+p the memory of her simplicities clung like an exquisite bouquet to the intoxicating image of her; but in eight years of daily intimacy the flavour and the perfume of mere innocence had evaporated. The quality which had first charmed him was, perhaps, the first of which he had grown weary. He still loved Virginia, but he had ceased to talk to her. ”If you go into the refrigerator, Oliver, don't upset Jenny's bottle of milk,” she said, looking after him as he turned towards the dining-room.

Her foot was already on the bottom step of the staircase, for she had heard, or imagined that she had heard, a sound from the nursery, and she was impatient to see if one of the children had awakened and got out of bed. All the evening, while she had changed the skin-tight sleeves of the eighties to the balloon ones of the nineties in an old waist which she had had before her marriage and had never worn because it was unbecoming, her thoughts had been of Harry, whom she had punished for some act of flagrant rebellion during the afternoon. Now she was eager to comfort him if he was awake and unhappy, or merely to cuddle and kiss him if he was fast asleep in his bed.

At the top of the staircase she saw the lowered lamp in the nursery, and beside it stood Harry in his little nightgown, with a toy s.h.i.+p in his arms.

”Mamma, I'm tired of bed and I want to play.”

”S--sush, darling, you will wake Jenny. It isn't day yet. You must go back to bed.”

”But I'm tired of bed.”

”You won't be after I tuck you in.”

”Will you sit by me and tell me a story?”

”Yes, darling, I'll tell you a story if you'll promise not to talk.”

Her eyes were heavy with sleep, and her limbs trembled from the exhaustion of the long June day; but she remembered the punishment of the afternoon, and as she looked at him her heart seemed melting with tenderness.