13
George Basine was going to see his sister Doris. In the nine years since she had left her mother's home she had become a strange woman to Basine. She had always been strange to him. But now it was as if she were entirely unhuman.
He could talk to her without shame of things that were shameful. But there was something more tangible in her presence than the joy of being able to confess things to her. She was practical in her ideas. She gave him hunches for his speeches sometimes and what she said about people and how to make an impression on them was always of value. She understood such things. How, he couldn't determine. It was probably an instinct with her.
Basine walked along in the spring afternoon. It was Sunday and he should have stayed home. Henrietta had been angry when he left. Sunday was his day for her and the two children. There were two children now—one a boy of seven, and a girl of five.
But he said, "I want to see Doris. She's been feeling rather off lately. And if you don't believe I'm going there, why just call up in an hour. And keep on calling every hour if you want to keep check on me."
He was always angry with his wife when he left her. She made him feel that he was doing wrong, although she seldom said anything. But to go away and leave her on Sunday was wrong. But not for the reasons she sometimes hinted at.
He knew that she suspected his frequent absences from the house. He accused her of hounding him with her jealousy, and the knowledge of his innocence—he had never been unfaithful during the eight years of their marriage—made him angry. The elation of righteous anger in which he indulged himself on all occasions involving Henrietta, was a ruse which obscured for both himself and his wife the actual reasons of his absences. She bored him to a point of fury. His children and their endless noises and questionings set his nerves on edge. He fled in order to escape his home. But Henrietta hinted that he left her for someone else. And he denied this hotly. And in the excitement which accusation and denial aroused both of them managed to avoid facing the fact that he stayed away for no other reason than to escape the boredom of her presence and discomfort of his home.
Basine was careful to avoid this fact. It was incompatable with his ideas. He had become a man of belligerent righteousness. He was slowly emerging as a public figure. As an assistant in the state's attorney's office his political activities were attracting more attention than his legal work. He was in demand as a campaign orator. And the candidates in whose behalf he addressed the public were men, he pointed out with an air of fearlessness, who believed first of all that the home was the cornerstone of civilization.
"He is a man worth while," he would declaim, "a capable administrator. But first of all our candidate is like you and me. His heart is centered in his home. The greatest rewards life holds for him are not the offices we are able to bestow on him but the love of his wife and children."