XII
ASLEEP
Mr. and Mrs. Belrose occupied a small bedroom at the top of their house. As for her sister and his sister, they fitted their amplitudes into some vague "somewhere else," and those of the curious who in the way of business or otherwise knew how nearly the entire house was devoted to "wholesale," wondered where the two sisters-in-law did in fact stow themselves. The servant slept out.
In the middle of the night Mrs. Belrose raised her magnificent form out of the overburdened bed and went to the window to look forth on the Steps.
"Charlie," said she, coming back to the bed and shaking her husband. He awoke unwillingly and grunted, and muttered that she was taking cold; an absurd suggestion, as he knew well, for she never took cold, and it was inconceivable that she should take cold.
"That light's still burning at T. T.'s—in the shop. I don't like the look of it."
She lit the room, and the fancies of night seemed to be dispelled by an onrush of realism, dailiness and sagacity. Mr. and Mrs. Belrose considered themselves to be two of the most sagacious and imperturbable persons that ever lived, and they probably were.
No circumstances were too much for their sagacity and their presence of mind. Each had complete confidence in the kindly but unsentimental horse-sense of the other. Mrs. Belrose, despite her youngishness, was the more impressive. She it was who usually said the final word in shaping a policy; yet in her utterances there was an implication that Charles had a super-wisdom which she alone could inspire, and also that he, being a man, could do certain things that she, being a woman, was ever so slightly incapable of.
"I don't like the look of it at all," she said.