Her husband came in alone, late, and what she called “rumpled-looking,” though no outward disorder was ever visible in his carefully brushed person, and the signs she referred to lurked only about his mouth and eyes.
“Any lunch left? I hope there’s something hot—never mind what.” And, as he dropped into his seat, and the parlourmaid disappeared with hurried orders, he added, unfolding his napkin with a sardonic deliberation: “Well, your infant prodigy never turned up.”
Ah, how well she knew that law of his nature! Plans that didn’t come off were almost always ascribed (in all good faith) to others; and the prodigy who had failed him became hers. She smiled a little to see him so ridiculously ruffled by so small a contretemps. “Genius is proverbially unpunctual,” she suggested.
“Oh, genius—” He shrugged the epithet away. She might have that too, while she was about it. “After all, he may never do anything again. One good story doesn’t make a summer.”
“No, and mediocrity is apt to be unpunctual as genius.”
“Unpunctual? The fellow never came at all. Fixed his own hour—eleven. I put off two other important appointments and hung about the office waiting till after half-past one. I’d rather planned to take him round to the Café Jacques for lunch. A young fellow like that, from nowhere, often thaws out more easily if you feed him first, and encourage him to talk about himself. Vanity,” said Tarrant, as the maid approached with a smoking dish, “vanity’s always the first button to press. … Eggs? Good Lord, Halo, hasn’t that cook learnt yet that eggs are slow death to me? Oh, well, I’ll eat the bacon—What else? A chop she can grill? The inevitable chop! Oh, of course it’ll do.” He turned to his wife with the faint smile which etched little dry lines at the corners of his mouth. “I can’t say you’ve your mother’s culinary imagination, Halo.”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered good-humouredly; but a touch of acerbity made her add: “It would be rather wasted on a digestion like yours.”
Her husband paled a little. She so seldom said anything disagreeable that he was doubly offended when she did. “I might answer that if I had better food I should digest better,” he said.
“Yes, and I might answer that if your programme weren’t so limited I could provide more amusing food for you. But I’d sooner admit at once that I never did have Mother’s knack about things to eat, and I don’t wonder my menus bore you.” It was the way their small domestic squabbles usually ended—by her half contemptuously throwing him the sop he wanted.
He said, with the note of sulkiness that often marred his expiations: “No doubt I’m less easy to provide for than a glutton like Frenside—” then, furtively abstracting an egg from the dish before him: “It’s a damned nuisance, having all my plans upset this way. … And a fellow I was hoping I might fit into the office permanently. …”
Halo suggested that perhaps the young man’s train had been delayed or run into—that perhaps at that very moment he was lying dead under a heap of wreckage; but Tarrant grumbled: “When people break appointments it’s never because they’re dead”—a statement her own experience bore out.
“He’s sure to turn up this afternoon,” she said, as one comforts a child for a deferred treat; but the suggestion brought no solace to Tarrant. He reminded her with a certain tartness (for he liked her to remember his engagements, if he happened to have mentioned them to her) that he was taking the three o’clock train for Philadelphia, where he had an important appointment with a firm of printers who were preparing estimates for him. There was no possibility of his returning to the office that day; he might even decide to take a night train from Philadelphia to Boston, where he would probably have to spend Saturday morning, also on business connected with the review. He didn’t know when he was going to be able to see Weston—and it was all a damned nuisance, especially as the young fool had given no New York address, and they had hoped to rush a Weston story into their coming number.
Time was when Halo, as a matter of course, would have offered to interview the delinquent. Now she knew better. She had learned that in such matters she could be of use to her husband only indirectly. The very tie she had most counted on in the early days of their marriage—a community of ideas and interests—had been the first to fail her. She knew now that the myth of his intellectual isolation was necessary to Tarrant’s pride. Nothing would have annoyed him more than to have her suggest that she might take a look at young Weston’s manuscripts. “Of course you could, my dear; it would be the greatest luck for the boy if you would—only, you know, I must reserve my independence of judgment. And if you were to raise false hopes in the poor devil—let yourself be carried away, as I remember you were once by his poetry—it would be a beastly job for me to have to turn him down afterward.” She could hear him saying that, and she knew that the satisfaction of asserting his superiority by depreciating what she had praised would outweigh any advantage he might miss by doing so. “Oh, young Weston will keep,” she acquiesced indifferently, as Tarrant got up to go.
The door closed on him, and she sat there with the golden afternoon on her hands. She said to herself: “There has never been such a beautiful November—” and her imagination danced with visions of happy people, young, vigorous, self-confident, draining with eager lips the last drops of autumn sunshine. Always in twos they
