Her weariness lasted through the first few days at the sanatorium. She was well content to lie in bed and think of nothing. But by the fifth or sixth day she began to wonder where she had left the key of the cedar closet; and several possibilities of error in the arrangements she had made to reach from garret to cellar began to creep into her consciousness. Her elder boy was subject to throat trouble; her younger was subtly averse to bathing. She had not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasized these two dangers. She had, however, given her promise not to communicate with her household except in case of necessity.
Conscientious in her determination to do what she had set out to do, she took out some of the books she had brought with her, but they seemed an unsatisfactory lot: the novels, trashy; the essays, dull; the history, heavy. Strange, she thought, how people will recommend books which really did not even hold one’s attention.
The word attention, bringing with it the recollection of Despard’s speech, recalled her to her obligations. Heavy or not, she was resolved to make her way through the volume.
She read: “It has been argued that the too rapid introduction of modern political machinery, and the too rapid unification of such different populations as those—” Had she told them not to keep the house too hot in these first spring days? Overheated houses, in her opinion, were a fruitful source of ill health. “—though these may with more justice be ascribed to deep-seated sociological causes stretching back through two thousand years—” This was the season for putting away the furs. If, in her absence, moths should attack her husband’s sable-lined overcoat! Ah, she put down her book; this was serious.
Fifteen minutes later she went out, trying to walk off the haunting presence of that fur coat.
There was something not a little heroic in her struggle with temptations—staying on while every notion she had heretofore considered righteous called to her to go back. Hideous pictures of ruin and discomfort at home floated before her mind. She had to admit she found a certain grim satisfaction in such visions. They would at least prove to Despard how little the modern family is able to dispense with the services of the old-fashioned mother.
She was human enough to be eager to prove him wrong in essentials, for in minor matters he had shown himself terribly accurate. With unlimited leisure on her hands she was surprised to find how little enjoyment she derived from her books. She read herself to sleep with a novel every night, but it was enough for her to open one of the more serious works for her mind to rush back to the old domestic problems. Her eyes alone would read the printed page.
Her life seemed hideously vacant—empty, as she put it, of all affection; but it was also empty of all machinery—perhaps the greater change of the two. She had no small duties, no orders to give, no mistakes to correct.
She was not forbidden to communicate with Despard, and at the end of a week she telegraphed him that she was going home. He came to her at once.
“I am doing what I know to be wrong,” she broke out. “I am neglecting my family.”