He shot out his arms with a luxurious stretching gesture. “Mice and Mumps, it’s been fine for me, I can tell you. Fine, fine!”
How happy he looked! How handsome he looked! Her thought was “Dear Harry!”
He got up and began to set about his departure. She went with him into the hall and she called up the stairs, “Children, father’s going.” They came bounding down. He joked and played with them. He loved this custom, now long established. She brushed his hat, also a rite she knew he loved. He kissed her with particular affection. “Yes, you go up to Field’s and give old Sturgiss and old Field my love. You’ll almost have forgotten the way there. I say, it’s funny, isn’t it, how time changes things and how it goes? We couldn’t have imaged this once, and here it is the most established thing in the world. Do you know, it’s almost exactly a year since you chucked it?”
“Chucked it!” The light expression smote her. O manlike man that thus could phrase divorce that from her heart’s engrossment had cut her life asunder!
In the afternoon she set out upon her intention. It meant nothing, her visit, she assured herself. It had no purpose beyond the exchange of courtesies. But when she was leaving the house she paused. Should she go? She went down the steps and through the gate, then paused again. She returned to the house. She had an idea. She would take the children with her. She called them, and while they gleefully dressed for the outing she repeated to herself the word in which the idea of taking them with her had come to her.
“A bodyguard!” she said.
The note of laughter she gave at the word had a tremulous sound.
Tremulous would well have described her manner when they were at Field’s. She was asking herself as they went towards the City what it was that she wanted to hear—that Field’s was doing very well without her? That her department was not doing very well without her? Which?
She would not let her mind affirm which it was that she desired.
It appeared, when they arrived, that it was neither, nor anything at all to do with the Bank. Her first words to the partners were of smiling apology at bringing to precincts sacred to business, “a herd of children.” That was a natural introduction of herself; it was an unusual thing to do. But not natural the way in which she maintained the subject of the children. It seemed that she had come to talk of nothing else. Tremulous she was; talking, of the children, with the incessant eagerness, and with the nervous eagerness, of one either clamant to establish a case or frightened of a break in the conversation lest a break should cause appearance of a subject most desperately to be avoided.