Marley sighed in relief when he went up the steps of the Blair house that evening. Somehow he had got through the long, desolate day. He was sore from his great defeat, but the worst, at any rate, was over; the pang had been sharp, but now the pain had been dulled. He had spent the day in the office. Wade Powell had been in and out, but never once had he spoken of the clerkship, and Marley was too deep in humiliation to mention it. His one consolation was in the fact that he had never told any one of his prospect, not even his own mother; it had been a secret which he and Lavinia had shared luxuriously; though, as Marley now looked back on their joy, he realized that what had kept him from telling any one was a prudent skepticism, a lack of faith in the possibility of human happiness, an inherited dread of the calamity that stalks every joy.
Lavinia flung the hall door wide for him before he could ring the bell.
“What is the matter?”
“How did you know anything was?” he asked.
“Why,” she exclaimed, “I could tell the minute I heard your step. Tell me—what is it?”
Marley, ever sensitive to atmospheres, instantly felt the peace of the household. The glow from the living-room, a quiet voice speaking a commonplace word now and then, told him that Mrs. Blair was there with Connie and Chad, and he knew the children were at their lessons; he caught the faint odor of a cigar, and he knew that Judge Blair was in his library reading peacefully of the dead and silent past, whose men had left all their troubles in the leaves of printed books; all round him life was flowing on, unconsciously, and normally; the tumult and strife in his own soul were nothing to the world. All this flashed on him in an instant—and there was Lavinia, standing before him, her white brow knit in perplexity.
“Tell me,” she was saying, “what it is.”
“Well, I don’t get the job, that’s all.”
He felt a momentary savage pleasure in the pain he inflicted, justifying it in the thought that he eased his own suffering by giving it to another. Then as quickly he repented, and felt ashamed.
“Is that all?” she said. She had come close to him, smiling in her sympathy, and then lifting a hand to his forehead.