“Do they sell on the instalment plan?” he asked. There was a wistful effect in his voice which caught her attention.
She looked away—out through the window on the street below—for a moment. Then her eyes returned to his, and regarded him with a comforting, friendly, half-motherly glance, recalling for all the world the way Sister Soulsby had looked at him at odd times.
“Oh, you want it at once—I see,” she remarked softly. “Well, this Adelberger is the best value for the money.”
Mr. Ware followed her finger, and beheld with dismay that it pointed toward the largest instrument in the room—a veritable leviathan among pianos. The price of this had been mentioned as $600. He turned over the fact that this was two-thirds his yearly salary, and found the courage to shake his head.
“It would be too large—much too large—for the room,” he explained. “And, besides, it is more than I like to pay—or can pay, for that matter.” It was pitiful to be explaining such details, but there was no help for it.
They picked out a smaller one, which Celia said was at least of fair quality. “Now leave all the bargaining to me,” she adjured him. “These prices that they talk about in the piano trade are all in the air. There are tremendous discounts, if one knows how to insist upon them. All you have to do is to tell them to send it to your house—you wanted it today, you said?”
“Yes—in memory of yesterday,” he murmured.
She herself gave the directions, and Thurston’s people, now all salesmen again, bowed grateful acquiescence. Then she sailed regally across the room and down the stairs, drawing Theron in her train. The hirelings made salaams to him as well; it would have been impossible to interpose anything so trivial and squalid as talk about terms and dates of payment.
“I am ever so much obliged to you,” he said fervently, in the comparative solitude of the lower floor. She had paused to look at something in the book-department.
“Of course I was entirely at your service; don’t mention it,” she replied, reaching forth her hand in an absent way for her parasol.
He held up instead the volume he had purchased. “Guess what that is! You never would guess in this wide world!” His manner was surcharged with a sense of the surreptitious.
“Well, then, there’s no good trying, is there?” commented Celia, her glance roving again toward the shelves.
“It is a life of George Sand,” whispered Theron. “I’ve been reading it this morning—all the Chopin part—while I was waiting for you.”
To his surprise, there was an apparently displeased contraction of her brows as he made this revelation. For the instant, a dreadful fear of having offended her seized upon and sickened him. But then her face cleared, as by magic. She smiled, and let her eyes twinkle in laughter at him, and lifted a forefinger in the most winning mockery of admonition.
“Naughty! naughty!” she murmured back, with a roguishly solemn wink.
He had no response ready for this, but mutely handed her the parasol. The situation had suddenly grown too confused for words, or even sequent thoughts. Uppermost across the hurly-burly of his mind there scudded the singular reflection that he should never hear her play on that new piano of his. Even as it flashed by out of sight, he recognized it for one of the griefs of his life; and the darkness which followed seemed nothing but a revolt against the idea of having a piano at all. He would countermand the order. He would—but she was speaking again.
They had strolled toward the door, and her voice was as placidly conventional as if the talk had never strayed from the subject of pianos. Theron with an effort pulled himself together, and laid hold of her words.
“I suppose you will be going the other way,” she was saying. “I shall have to be at the church all day. We have just got a new Mass over from Vienna, and I’m head over heels in work at it. I can have Father Forbes to myself today, too. That bear of a doctor has got the rheumatism, and can’t come out of his cave, thank Heaven!”
And then she was receding from view, up the sunlit, busy sidewalk, and Theron, standing on the doorstep, ruefully rubbed his chin. She had said he was going the other way, and, after a little pause, he made her words good, though each step he took seemed all in despite of his personal inclinations. Some of the passersby bowed to him, and one or two paused as if to shake hands and exchange greetings. He nodded responses mechanically, but did not stop. It was as if he feared to interrupt the process of lifting his reluctant feet and propelling them forward, lest they should wheel and scuttle off in the opposite direction.
XXI
Deliberate as his progress was, the diminishing number of storefronts along the sidewalk, and the increasing proportion of picket-fences enclosing domestic lawns, forced upon Theron’s attention the fact that he was nearing home. It was a trifle past the hour for his midday meal. He was not in the least hungry; still less did he feel any desire just now to sit about in that library living-room of his. Why should he go home at all? There was no reason whatever—save that Alice would be expecting him. Upon reflection, that hardly amounted to a reason. Wives, with their limited grasp of the realities of life, were always expecting their husbands to do things which it turned out not to be feasible for them to do. The customary male animal spent a considerable part of his life in explaining to his mate why it had been necessary to disappoint or upset her little plans for his comings and goings. It was in the very nature of things that it should be so.
Sustained by these considerations, Mr. Ware slackened his steps, then halted irresolutely, and after
