Her hands flew about, pleating her little lace handkerchief, smoothing it out again, drumming a tune on the table. Her black eyes slipped this way and that.
“I suppose Victor’ll be home on the four o’clock train?”
Whenever she spoke Victor’s name, it was as if strong hands that she loved—his hands—took hold of her heart and twisted it. It hurt her so that some day she felt she would fall down dead of the pain, and yet she was always in a fever to say his name, over and over again; in a fever to see him, to hurt herself watching his dark ugly face with its bittersweet smile, and the smiling passion in his eyes when he looked at his wife.
“Yes, he wrote and said to have Toot meet him.” Mamma’s hand sought in her bosom for Papa’s letter. She brought out the dinner menu first, but the letter was there too.
“He’s been staying at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but he went twice to Delmonico’s and had turtle soup.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt he’s had a gay time,” said Cousin Lizzie, getting up and moving about the room restlessly, crushing a sprig of lemon-verbena between nervous fingers, flapping over the songs on the piano. “Have you anything new? ‘Oh Let Me Shed One Silent Tear’—‘Too Late, Too Late’—you do like merry songs, don’t you, Margaret? How does this go?
‘Not lost forever, though by fate now parted,
Not lost forever, though we meet no more;
They do not wander lone and brokenhearted—!’
Yes, I’m sure he’s had a good time. Victor’s always known how to amuse himself very well.”
“He had to go on business,” Mamma replied, displeased and dignified. “Very important business. He told me all about it before he went.”
And he had, for although he had no illusions about his wife’s mentality, he liked to talk to her about the things that interested him. He had talked to her all one evening about the business that was taking him to New York; and Mamma had said, “Yes, love,” and “Well!” and “I’m sure you’re right,” when the tone of his voice seemed to call for such remarks. As a matter of fact she hadn’t listened to a word, for she had been crocheting a floral card-basket that called for a great deal of counting. The bottom was a star of white on claret that shaded to violet on the border; and there were crocheted dark and light green leaves, and straw-colored poppies shading into claret and violet, all spangled with dewdrops of little glass beads. It was only by the greatest effort she had kept from counting aloud, “single chain over the last single chain under the same chain, four chain, single chain under chain before the second double chain, seven chain.” Papa, kissing the top of her head, as sleek and brown as a horsechestnut under its chenille net, had assured her that it was a great relief to find that she agreed with him.
“Well, I must fly, love!” cried Cousin Lizzie. “Mr. B. will be waiting for me. ‘Not lost forever, though by fate now parted—’ No, not lost forever, only until dinner time!”
And at last Mamma could drop on the sofa, her bright blue skirts swelling up around her. On the table near by, in a workbasket petticoated with pinked frills of violet and maize-colored ribbon, lay her sewing; on it lay also the book she was reading, drawn to it by the heroine’s name being Margaret, just like hers. “ ‘Margaret, Marchioness of Miniver,’ by Lady Clara Cavendish, authoress of ‘Lisa, or The Mesmerist’s Victim,’ ‘The Divorce, a Tale of Fashionable Life,’ ‘The Woman of the World,’ etc.” Perhaps, presently, she would sew a little, or read. If she read she would have to hide her book before Papa came home, for she knew he would hope to find her reading “The New Gymnastics for Men, Women, and Children,” all full of dumbbells. He was so modern and full of upsetting ideas—exercise, and air, insisting on having a window in the children’s bedroom lowered an inch or two at night, although Mamma pointed out to him again and again that everyone knew the night air was injurious.
But just for the moment she only wanted to lie still.
Oh, how nice, how nice! She made little nestling motions, settling deeper on her sofa, letting comfort surround her softly. She was all soft and smooth and round—so round that she sometimes thought, but only thought, of drinking vinegar. She lay there, stretching and stirring a little at first from sheer comfort, then growing motionless; heavy and soft and white, a lady made of white velvet and stuffed with down.
II
Victor Campion met Margaret Southmayd a few years after he graduated from Harvard, when he went to visit her brother Henry, who had been a classmate.
There had been guests in his honor on the afternoon before he went home—young men a little standoffish and suspicious of the stranger who had so much money, and had made the “Grand Tour,” and was just home from England and inclined to talk about the opening of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park; arch young ladies not at all standoffish, tossing their ringlets and shrugging their shoulders and making “saucy” replies. There had been strawberries and cream, and croquet with tiny mallets and huge balls banded with bright colors that they sent trundling through wide wickets. The shadows grew long on the gold-green turf, and the girls’ great crinolines, swinging and swaying as they bent above their balls, took on the tender colors of flowers at twilight. And through the laughter and the calling there sometimes sounded a note of sadness, though they were all so happy.
Now they were gone; and Henry had gone with them to get the mail, while Victor and Margaret collected the strawberry saucers and put the mallets and balls to bed in their box in the dark summerhouse
