"Do you really want us to take Lady Jane, daddy? I ought to take Matilda; Lady Jane went last week."
"Well, I'd rather have Lady Jane, because she knows the first half of the story already and I'd have to go all over it from the beginning for Matilda."
Puck sighed her relief and scampered off.
"Greg, don't tell her any of those terribly exciting things. You never seem to understand how highly strung she is. All last week she kept on giving the most terrible versions of that bear story to Lady Jane. You don't realize what an imagination she's got."
"Thank God," Gregory snapped, and wished that Margaret would sometimes give him an excuse to be as rude as he felt.
Out in the woods, with Puck trotting by his side, Gregory tried to push the picture Margaret had brought before him into the cool shade of the trees. But, in the shortest interludes of Puck's silence, it was there before him again, hot and glaring and tawdry: Jean Herrick, married to a libertine. A man who, in sottish sensuality, turned from one woman to another. And she had "stood it,"—that ghastly compromise of weak women—until it had passed beyond bounds.
It was impossible. And yet what did he know of women?
There had been that one grisette in Paris, who had embarrassed him so by calling his smile "un petit oiseau." A single month's mildest flirtation with a pretty stenographer, who was more like a mischievous boy than a girl. And Margaret. He had married Margaret because she was so different from the grisette and, yet, when he had put his arms round Margaret for the first time, and she turned her sweet, unresponsive lips to his, he had wanted to crush her, hurt her in some way, just as he had once wanted to choke the grisette. As Margaret wasn't a grisette, Gregory had believed the big love of his life had come. Afterwards the need of making his place in the world had claimed him. And, now, occasional moods he dispelled with extra work and Puck.
Margaret had always told him he was interested in nothing that he could not draw, and did not know what was going on in the world. Perhaps women were part of the "things going on." Perhaps he was old-fashioned. Perhaps it was a puritanical streak, this intense repulsion to thinking of Jean married to a drunken libertine. It would not have been a happy memory, but Gregory could imagine a dozen men he knew, himself even, living down such a memory, doing useful work in spite of an unfaithful, drunken wife put out of their lives. How did he know but that——
"Dad-dy, did the bears get the children?"