“No,” answered the woman; “she hires it. We have neither of us been married, and children as children are hateful to us. I do not think any man could be got to marry my sister Emile. The face behind her veil is ravaged—unsightly. She owes no debt of gratitude to man or God; we neither of us do; they are our enemies. Is that a fraud—the mystery of her veil? Let him answer for it who wove its meshes. She had been beautiful once. Only her voice lives and pleads in a dead land; and with it and through it she obtains these means to the amelioration of her bitter lot—these little toys and graces which her soul loves, and to surround herself with which she suffers and wearies through each livelong day. Call it a fraud if you will. In this inhuman world our souls have ceased to count with us.”
Sick at heart, Gilead turned to the door.
“Are you going to expose her,” said the woman—“to tear her veil away?”
“No,” he answered. “I want fresh air, that’s all.”
CHAPTER XII.
THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN
Nothing short of the direct interposition of Providence can be held to explain the premature chancing into Gilead’s hands one morning of an ex-official copy of the Daily Post. The thing might have happened on any other morning in the year and signified nothing; it happened, as it happened, on the one and only morning on which it could signify a great deal. He invariably read the Times at breakfast, and the other paper, or Nestle’s report on it, on his arrival at the office. Providence, desiring his independent notice of this particular issue, found occasion therefore to slip under his nose a copy of it, brought in, and forgotten, by some casual acquaintance who had sought him for a moment on a personal matter.
He might not have looked at it even then, had he not chanced—chanced, mark you—in rising to reach for the marmalade, to tread on an iron tack.
Now there was no reason, other than a providential one, why the tack should have been there; no reason why it should have stood up awkwardly on its head; none why its point should have penetrated the only thin place in the young gentleman’s pump. That all these things happened, with the result that, in the start and clutch he gave, he knocked over the Daily Post and stooped to pick it up again, can be ascribed to supernatural design and to that alone.
As he sat down, shin over thigh, to pluck the obtrusive nail from his sole, his eye was caught by an advertisement prominent in the Agony Column of the paper he held in his left hand:—
“To Psychisis. Old gentleman suffering from obesity desires disintegration and reconstitution on normal lines. Superfluous flesh given away to the needy. No Shylocks need apply.”