“I?” she exclaimed, but she was resting her head against the upholstered back of the seat. “Poor lady!” she murmured then. “So pitifully—broken! It wasn’t only—herself that Marian hurt.”
“I don’t suppose it ever is,” said Stacey wearily.
Catherine gave him a look of sympathy. “Can you sleep, do you think?” she asked.
But at this he sat erect. “I refuse to have you bother your head about me too,” he said sharply. “Yes, I know I can sleep.”
Mr. Latimer and the others interested succeeded in keeping the truth hidden. Officially, even according to the account given by the sensational evening paper, the death was an accident—there had been burglaries, the times were unsafe, there was a wave of crime in Vernon, Marian had been placing a revolver in the drawer of her desk, and all the rest of it. Privately no one believed the story, and the various things that people did believe were too wild to deserve mention. But officially every one believed it. Officially every one in Vernon always believed what he should. This was Vernon’s great strength.
Stacey did not recover easily from the shock. Perhaps it even worked some permanent change in him. For it left him bruised, saddened, yet somehow calmer and cooler. He worked tremendously at the office, and in the days immediately following the tragedy did indeed value his work mostly as a means to temporary forgetfulness. He saw but few people, and only two or three of these willingly, for he found it hard to talk. He was glad enough to see Edwards now and then at the luncheon hour—at least after their first meeting, when, to excuse the manner he simply could not help, Stacey felt obliged to tell him, who came from an outside world, that Marian Price had been an old friend and that he was pretty cut up by her death; which was hard. Yet Edwards’ gruff awkward expression of sympathy was not unpleasant.
Stacey’s memory of Marian was as of something delicate, lovely and frustrated, and it was softened by that final unwonted touch of tenderness she had shown; but he could never quite forgive Marian what she had done to her mother. In this she had been her father’s daughter. Callous toward others, the Latimers! Hard, at bottom.
He went as often as he could to see Mrs. Latimer, or took her out with him into the park. She recovered from the terrible prostration of that first night, even quickly; she regained an adequate composure of manner; and her sensitive receptive mind was intact. She had always had the faculty of true intuition, which is (as opposed to the false intuition that means merely guessing) the faculty of thinking so swiftly that the logical steps along the way are barely brushed by the flying thought, and the conclusion is so quickly reached that to the breathless beholder it appears to have been attained at one leap. This faculty she did not lose. But in her own attitude toward the world she was sadly changed, no longer a strong flexible personality armed with a gentle irony, giving more than she took, unafraid of facts; she had become a weak shaken woman, with no shelter for her sensitive soul. Almost terrified she seemed at times. And it was Stacey who now tried to give her the support she had formerly tried to give him.
He noted one peculiarity that seemed rather horrible to him. For at least two months after Marian’s death Mrs. Latimer could not see her husband enter a room where she was without giving a shudder of revulsion at his presence.