Stacey, however, had forgotten him. A dozen thoughts were moving through the young man’s mind, yet not turbulently, but smoothly, without interference, like ships on a wide river. Perhaps this was because he was not thinking of himself at all, but of Phil and Catherine. He looked at Catherine, sitting there across the hearth, she, too, apparently far away in thought, and tried to study her objectively. She was tall and dark and handsome, with high cheek-bones, a high forehead, and black eyes set deep beneath long sweeping lashes. She had a magnificent figure, lithe, supple and without opulence—slender, even,—but making evident the large bony structure. So, too, with her head. It was like a firm Mantegna drawing, revealing clearly what lay beneath the smooth close-textured skin. Therefore in repose her face appeared even stern. There was something sculpturesque about Catherine.
But these things were externals. What was she really like? Stacey could not discover. In all the years that he had known her, first as Philip’s fiancée and then as Philip’s wife, he had never got beneath her intense shy reserve. Yet—which seemed odd—there was no sense of constraint between them as long as Phil was there, too. Stacey could talk impersonally with her, or, better still, sit for a long time silent with her, as now, perfectly at ease and sure that she, too, felt at ease. That was all, though. He could not understand the marriage. Still, he recognized that it was a happy marriage and he admitted loyally that a man very rarely did understand his most intimate friend’s choice of a wife.
Sometimes, he remembered, he had tried to sum up Catherine and her relation to Phil impressionistically. Once he had told himself that she was like a castle and Philip like a wind blowing around it, rattling the shutters but leaving the castle permanent and unchanged. But he felt a touch of impatience now in the recollection of that judgment. He had always been full of such fancies. Perhaps he had even cultivated them and felt a small pride in them. Somehow, in these last weeks he had come to feel almost antipathy for these baubles. What did they really explain? What good did it do to catch a mood, even truly? What was a mood but an evanescent unrelated thing?
But distaste for oneself does not suffice to alter one’s nature. Stacey did not perceive that his present musings had the same quality they disapproved of.
It was Carter who broke the silence—with a plaintive unconscious sigh.
Philip laughed, but his visitor started. “Oh, Carter, old chap,” he said remorsefully, “I forgot all about Jack and Jill! I’m ready now. Come on over.”
The child ran to him delightedly, all the ages and ages of tedious waiting forgotten at once; and Stacey took a postage stamp from his pocket, tore it carefully in half, and gummed the pieces to the nails of his two forefingers. Experience had taught him that stamps were safer than scraps of ordinary paper, which had an embarrassing way of coming off.
“Two little black-birds sitting on a hill,
One named Jack and one named Jill.
Fly away, Jack!—Fly away, Jill!