She gave him a little look which he obligingly took as a guerdon for this speech, and languidly held out her bracelets. As he stood clasping them on her arms, she quietly eyed him over from head to foot. “I don’t know of a man who has your figure,” said she with a certain tone of pride in her voice; “it is well you married a wife who does not look altogether inferior beside you.” Then as he bowed with mock appreciation of the intended compliment, added with her usual inconsequence, “I dare say it would give me something to interest myself in. I don’t suppose she has a decent thing to wear, and the fact of her being a dark beauty would lend quite a new impulse to my inventive faculty. Mrs. Walker has a daughter with black eyes, but dear me, what a guy she does make of her!”
With a sigh Mr. Sylvester turned to the window where he stood looking out at the heavy flakes of snow falling with slow and fluctuating movement between him and the row of brown stone houses in front. Paula considered as a milliner’s block upon which to try the effect of clothes!
“Even Mrs. Fitzgerald with all her taste don’t know how to dress her child,” proceeded his wife, with a hurried, “Be still, Cherry!” to the importunate bird in the cage. “Now I should take as much pride in dressing any one under my charge as I would myself, provided the subject was likely to do credit to my efforts.” And finding the bird incorrigible in his shrill singing, she moved over to the cage, where she stood balancing her white finger for the bird to peck at, with a pretty caressing motion of her lip, the little Geraldine of the wistful blue eyes, had never seen.
“You are welcome to do what you please in such matters,” was her husband’s reply. He was thinking again of that same little Geraldine; a fall of snow like the present always made him think of her and her innocent query as to whether God threw down such big flakes to amuse little children. “I give you carte blanche,” said he with sudden emphasis.
Mrs. Sylvester paused in her attentions to the bird to give him a sharp little look which might have aroused his surprise if he had been fortunate enough to see it. But his back was towards her, and there was nothing in the languidly careless tone with which she responded, to cause him to turn his head. “I see that you would really like to have me entertain the child; but—”
She paused, pursing up her lips to meet the chattering bird’s caress, while her husband in his impatience drummed with his fingers on the pane.
—“I must see her before I decide upon the length of her visit,” continued she, as weary with the sport she drew back to give herself a final look in the glass. “Will you please to hand me that shawl, Edward.”
He turned with alacrity. In his relief he could have kissed the snowy neck held so erectly before him, as he drew around it the shawl he had hastily lifted from the chair at his side. But that would not have suited this calm and languid beauty who disliked any too overt tribute to her charms and saved her caresses for her bird. Besides it would look like gratitude, and gratitude would be misplaced towards a wife who had just indicated her acceptance of his offer to receive a relative of her own into his house.
“She might as well come at once,” was her final remark, as satisfied at last with the lay of every ribbon she swept in finished elegance from the room. “Mrs. Kittredge’s reception comes off a week from Thursday, and I should like to see how a dark beauty with a fair skin would look in that new shade of heliotrope.”
And so the battle was over and the victory won; for Mrs. Sylvester for all her seeming indifference was never known to change a decision she had once made. As he realized the fact, as he meditated that ere long this very room which had been the scene of so much frivolity and the witness to so many secret heart-burnings, would reëcho to the tread of the pure and innocent child, whose mind had flights unknown to the slaves of fashion, and in whose heart lay impulses of goodness that would satisfy the long smothered cravings of his awakened nature, he experienced a feeling of relenting towards the wife who had not chosen to thwart him in this the strongest wish of his childless manhood, and crossing to her dressing table, he dropped among its treasures a costly ring which he had been induced to purchase that day from an old friend who had fallen into want. “She will wear it,” murmured he to himself, “for its hue will make her hand look still whiter, and when I see it sparkle I will remember this hour and be patient.” Had he known that she had yielded to this wish out of a certain vague feeling of compunction for the disappointments she had frequently occasioned him and would occasion him again, he might have added a tender thought to the rich and costly gift with which he had just endowed her.