§ ii
She telephoned to Gilbert in his office the next morning; she was so affable that he was upset. She should have been home long ago, anyhow, instead of staying down there alone on Staten Island in that peculiar way. He felt that she was trying to be ingratiating, and this of course aroused his hostility and distrust. Her quiet, clear voice reaching him in the midst of his morning mail caused him all the usual feelings of annoyance induced by any thought of home life. She asked him about his health, and he knew she didn’t care; she even asked that supremely irritating question “How is business?” Well did he know why his family asked that.
Then, amazingly, she said:
“If you’re not too tired, Gilbert, won’t you come down here for dinner? The garden is so lovely.”
“Suppose you come home,” he said, surlily, but it was only an instinctive reaction; the bear hitting out with his paw.
“Do come,” she said, pleasantly. “It would be nice to be by ourselves. And the garden—”
“Very well! Very well!” he said. “I’ll come. I can’t spend the morning at the telephone. I’ll come, Claudine. Good-by.”
Now this disturbed him. He was inclined to suspect, with reason, all advances made by his family, and yet he liked these advances. He felt fairly sure that his wife had some favour to ask, some feminine chicanery to execute, but he was like a king with his courtiers; he was grimly contemptuous of all this beguilement, but he relished the homage.
The idea of going back to that house on the hill to see Claudine stirred in him old and unpleasant memories. He felt himself no phantom; he was poignantly aware of the passing of twenty years and youth with them; he didn’t feel that he had not tried, but that he had not succeeded. He had made money, just as he had intended, but the rewards of his activity had been unjustly withheld. He had the wrong sort of wife, the wrong sort of children, the wrong sort of life altogether. Still he would do the right thing, as he had always done. He stopped on his way to the ferry and bought Claudine a five-pound box of chocolates, the kinds she hated most and which he had bought for years and years, never being undeceived.