share it with, crept into his mind and stayed there.
He shivered. These were unpleasant thoughts, and in his hour of clear
vision he knew whence they came. They were entirely due to the
knowledge that, instead of sitting comfortably at home, he would be
compelled in a few short hours to go out and get dinner at some
restaurant. To such a pass had he come in the twenty-sixth year of his
life.
Once the gods have marked a bachelor down, they give him few chances of
escape. It was when Kirk's mood was at its blackest, and the figure of
the abstract wife had ceased to be a menace and become a shining angel
of salvation, that Lora Delane Porter, with Ruth Bannister at her side,
rang the studio bell.
Kirk went to the door. He hoped it was a tradesman; he feared it was a
friend. In his present state of mind he had no use for friends. When he
found himself confronting Mrs. Porter he became momentarily incapable
of speech. It had not entered his mind that she would pay him a second
visit. Possibly it was joy that rendered him dumb.
'Good afternoon, Mr. Winfield,' said Mrs. Porter. 'I have come to
inquire after the man Pennicut. Ruth, this is Mr. Winfield. Mr.
Winfield, my niece, Miss Bannister.'
And Kirk perceived for the first time that his visitor was not alone.
In the shadow behind her a girl was standing. He stood aside to let
Mrs. Porter pass, and Ruth came into the light.
If there are degrees in speechlessness, Kirk's aphasia became doubled
and trebled at the sight of her. It seemed to him that he went all to
pieces, as if he had received a violent blow. Curious physical changes
were taking place in him. His legs, which only that morning he had
looked upon as eminently muscular, he now discovered to be composed of
some curiously unstable jelly.
He also perceived, a fact which he had never before suspected, that he
had heart-disease. His lungs, too, were in poor condition; he found it
practically impossible to breathe. The violent trembling fit which
assailed him he attributed to general organic weakness.
He gaped at Ruth.
Ruth, outwardly, remained unaffected by the meeting, but inwardly she
was feeling precisely the same sensation of smallness which had come to
Mrs. Porter on her first meeting with Kirk. If this sensation had been
novel to Mrs. Porter, it was even stranger to Ruth.
To think humbly of herself was an experience that seldom happened to
her. She was perfectly aware that her beauty was remarkable even in a
city of beautiful women, and it was rarely that she permitted her
knowledge of that fact to escape her. Her beauty, to her, was a natural
phenomenon, impossible to overlook. The realization of it did not
obtrude itself into her mind, it simply existed subconsciously.
Yet for an instant it ceased to exist. She was staggered by a sense of
inferiority.
It lasted but a pin-point of time, this riotous upheaval of her nature.
She recovered herself so swiftly that Kirk, busy with his own emotions,
had no suspicion of it.
