"If it comes to a puzzle and a mystery, I don't know where you'd find a greater one than Derek Pruyn himself. After the way he's acted—and treated people—"
Diane flushed, but kept her emotions sufficiently under control to be able to follow her usual plan of straightforward speaking.
"If you mean me, Mrs. Wappinger, I ought to say that Mr. Pruyn has done nothing for which I can blame him. He was placed in a situation with which only a very subtle intelligence could have dealt, and I respect him the more for not having had it. It's generally the man who is most competent in his own domain who is most likely to blunder when he gets into the woman's; and I, for one, would rather have him do it. I've had to suffer because of it, and so has Dorothea; and yet that doesn't make me like it less."
"No, I dare say not," Mrs. Wappinger responded, sympathetically. "Mr. Wappinger himself was just such a man as that. He'd put through a deal that would make Wall Street shiver; but he understood my woman's nature just about as much as old Tiger there, wagging his tail on the grass, follows the styles in bonnets. Only, I'll tell you what, Mrs. Eveleth: it's for men like that that God created sensible, capable wives, like you and me; and they ought to have 'em."
This theme admitting of little discussion, Diane did not pursue it, but she went away from Waterwild with a deepened sense of Derek's need of her, as well as of Dorothea's. She could so easily have helped them both that the enforced impotence was a new element in her pain. To walk the town in search of work to which she was little suited, when that which no one but herself could accomplish had to remain undone, became, during the next few weeks, the most intolerable part of the irony of circumstance. The wifely, the maternal qualities of her being, of which she had never been strongly conscious till of late, awoke in response to the need that drew them forth, only to be blighted by denial.
The inactivity was the harder to endure because of the fact that, as autumn passed into early winter, there came a period when all her little world seemed to have dropped her out of sight. There were no more "off-days" at Waterwild, and Miss Lucilla's occasional letters from Newport ceased. Between her mother-in-law and herself, after a few painful attempts at intercourse, there had fallen an equally painful silence. Even her two or three pupils fell away.
From the papers she learned that one or another of those for whom she cared was back in town again. She walked in the chief thoroughfares in the hope of meeting some of them, but chance refused to favor her. In the dusk of the early descending November and December twilights she passed their houses, watching the warm glow of the lights within, against which, now and then, a shadow that she could almost recognize would pass by. She could have entered at Miss Lucilla's door, or Mrs. Wappinger's; but a strange shyness, the shyness of the unfortunate, had taken hold of her, and she held back. In the mean time she was free to watch, with sad eyes and sadder spirit, the great city, reversing the processes of nature, awaken from the torpor of the genial months into its winter life.
No one knew better than herself that thrill of excited energy with which those born with the city instinct return from the acquired taste for mountain, seaside, and farm, to enter once more the maze of purely human relationships. It was a moment with which her own active nature was in sympathy. She liked to see the blinds being raised in the houses and the barricading doors taken down. She liked to see the vehicles begin to crowd one another in the streets and the pedestrians on the pavement wear a brisker air. She liked to see the shop-windows brighten with color and the great public gathering-spots let in and let out their throngs. She responded to the quickened animation with the spontaneity of one all ready to take her part, till the thought came that a part had been refused her. It was with a curious sensation of being outside the range of human activities that, during those days of timid, futile looking for employment, she roamed the busy thoroughfares of New York. As time passed she ceased to think much about her need of sympathetic fellowship in her anxiety to get work. She wrote advertisements and answered them; she applied at schools, and offices, and shops; she came down to seeking any humble drudgery which would give her the chance to live.
It was not till one day in early December that the last flicker of her hope went out. Chance had made her pass at midday along the pavement opposite one of the great restaurants. Lifting her eyes instinctively toward the group of well-dressed people on the steps, she saw that Mrs. Bayford and Marion Grimston were going in, accompanied by Reggie Bradford and the Marquis de Bienville. She had heard little or nothing of them during the last four empty months; but it was plain now that the lovers were agreed and her own cause abandoned. Up to this moment she had not realized how tenaciously she had clung to the belief that the proud, high-souled girl would yet see justice done her; and now she had deserted her, like the rest!
For the first time during her years of struggle she felt absolutely beaten—beaten so thoroughly that it would be useless to renew the fight. She had been on her way to see a lady who had advertised for a nursery governess; but she had no strength left with which to face the interview. In the winter-garden of the restaurant Mrs. Bayford was purring to her guests, Reggie Bradford was whispering to Miss Grimston, and the Marquis de Bienville was ordering the wines, while Diane was wandering blindly back to the poor little room she called her home, there to lie down and allow her heart to break.