Jaqueline caught her husband’s eye—he was swaying on a strap—and in an angry glance conveyed to him her entire disapproval of his action. He apologized mutely and became urgently engrossed in a row of car cards. The fat woman moved once more against Jaqueline—she was now practically overlapping her. Then she turned puffy, disagreeable eyes full on Mrs. James Mather, and coughed rousingly in her face.
With a smothered exclamation Jaqueline got to her feet, squeezed with brisk violence past the fleshy knees, and made her way, pink with rage, toward the rear of the car. There she seized a strap, and there she was presently joined by her husband in a state of considerable alarm.
They exchanged no word, but stood silently side by side for ten minutes while a row of men sitting in front of them crackled their newspapers and kept their eyes fixed virtuously upon the day’s cartoons.
When they left the car at last Jaqueline exploded.
“You big fool!” she cried wildly. “Did you see that horrible woman you gave your seat to? Why don’t you consider me occasionally instead of every fat selfish washwoman you meet?”
“How should I know—”
But Jaqueline was as angry at him as she had ever been—it was unusual for anyone to get angry at him.
“You didn’t see any of those men getting up for me, did you? No wonder you were too tired to go out last Monday night. You’d probably given your seat to some—to some horrible, Polish washwoman that’s strong as an ox and likes to stand up!”
They were walking along the slushy street stepping wildly into great pools of water. Confused and distressed, Mather could utter neither apology nor defense.
Jaqueline broke off and then turned to him with a curious light in her eyes. The words in which she couched her summary of the situation were probably the most disagreeable that had ever been addressed to him in his life.
“The trouble with you, Jim, the reason you’re such an easy mark, is that you’ve got the ideas of a college freshman—you’re a professional nice fellow.”
II
The incident and the unpleasantness were forgotten. Mather’s vast good nature had smoothed over the roughness within an hour. References to it fell with a dying cadence throughout several days—then ceased and tumbled into the limbo of oblivion. I say “limbo,” for oblivion is, unfortunately, never quite oblivious. The subject was drowned out by the fact that Jaqueline with her customary spirit and coolness began the long, arduous, uphill business of bearing a child. Her natural traits and prejudices became intensified and she was less inclined to let things pass.
It was April now, and as yet they had not bought a car. Mather had discovered that he was saving practically nothing and that in another half-year he would have a family on his hands. It worried him. A wrinkle—small, tentative, undisturbing—appeared for the first time as a shadow around his honest, friendly eyes. He worked far into the spring twilight now, and frequently brought home with him the overflow from his office day. The new car would have to be postponed for a while.
April afternoon, and all the city shopping on Washington Street. Jaqueline walked slowly past the shops, brooding without fear or depression on the shape into which her life was now being arbitrarily forced. Dry summer dust was in the wind; the sun bounded cheerily from the plate-glass windows and made radiant gasoline rainbows where automobile drippings had formed pools on the street.
Jaqueline stopped. Not six feet from her a bright new sport roadster was parked at the curb. Beside it stood two men in conversation, and at the moment when she identified one of them as young Bronson she heard him say to the other in a casual tone:
“What do you think of it? Just got it this morning.”
Jaqueline turned abruptly and walked with quick tapping steps to her husband’s office. With her usual curt nod to the stenographer she strode by her to the inner room. Mather looked up from his desk in surprise at her brusque entry.
“Jim,” she began breathlessly, “did Bronson ever pay you that three hundred?”
“Why—no,” he answered hesitantly, “not yet. He was in here last week and he explained that he was a little bit hard up.”
Her eyes gleamed with angry triumph.
“Oh, he did?” she snapped. “Well, he’s just bought a new sport roadster that must have cost anyhow twenty-five hundred dollars.”
He shook his head, unbelieving.
“I saw it,” she insisted. “I heard him say he’d just bought it.”
“He told me he was hard up,” repeated Mather helplessly.
Jaqueline audibly gave up by heaving a profound noise, a sort of groanish sigh.
“He was using you! He knew you were easy and he was using you. Can’t you see? He wanted you to buy him the car and you did!” She laughed bitterly. “He’s probably roaring his sides out to think how easily he worked you.”
“Oh, no,” protested Mather with a shocked expression, “you must have mistaken somebody for him—”
“We walk—and he rides on our money,” she interrupted excitedly. “Oh, it’s rich—it’s rich. If it wasn’t so maddening, it’d be just absurd. Look here—!” Her voice grew sharper, more restrained—there was a touch of contempt in it now. “You spend half your time doing things for people who don’t give a damn about you or what becomes of you. You give up your seat on the streetcar to hogs, and come home too dead tired to even move. You’re on all sorts of committees that take at least an hour a day out of your business and you don’t get a cent out of them. You’re—eternally—being used! I won’t stand it! I thought I married a man—not a professional Samaritan who’s going to fetch and carry for the world!”
As she finished her invective Jaqueline reeled suddenly and sank into a chair—nervously exhausted.
“Just at this time,” she went on brokenly, “I need you. I need your
