“Not for me,” his wife said, dismally. “The more I see of him the more terrible it is to think of him as permanent.”
“But can’t you think only of Lily?”
“Indeed, I can! I’m doing just that!”
“Well, then,” he urged, “think of the difference in her these two weeks have made. Now she’s interested in everything, happy in everything. How many times did we try to get her to go to the country club dances and be with the other young people of the kind she liked and enjoyed before this spell came upon her? She said she ‘hated the horrible old place!’ because Crabbe Osborne couldn’t go there.”
“He didn’t mind that,” Mrs. Dodge remarked. “He went anyhow until they sent him a note reminding him he wasn’t a member. That was why Lily said she hated it and we couldn’t get her to go any more. I was surprised she decided to go to-night, since she knows he can’t be there.”
“There’s the very point I’m making,” her husband said. “Two weeks ago we’d both have thought it was the last thing in the world she’d consent to do, and this evening we didn’t even suggest it to her; she went of her own volition, and cheerfully, too! I ask you if that doesn’t show she’s a different creature. And isn’t it better for two to suffer than three?”
“I ask you,” she returned, sharply: “How short sighted are you? We’re giving her a recess from pain, yes; but what are we thrusting her into? When she does see him as he is, and finds herself bound to him for life, isn’t she going to turn to us then, when it’s too late, and say: ‘Why didn’t you save me?’ ”
“Oh, Lord!” the father groaned, and his gesture was that of a man who has tried to make the best of his misery, but abandons the effort. “I don’t know! I can’t see! When you put it like that, I don’t know whether we’re doing right or wrong.” He paced the library floor, walking heavily, his head down. “It’s a miserable thing any way you look at it,” he said. “I did have just one slight alleviation: it seemed to me I bore it a little better, having him at the dinner-table this week, than I did the week before. It seemed to me maybe it might be because I was getting to like him a little, perhaps.”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “It was because he was here five times the first week and only three the second.”
“Is that so?” He stopped his pacing and stood still. “So she asked him five times the first week and only three the second. Doesn’t that look as if maybe——”