CHAPTER V
SQUIRREL IN A TRAP
"Do not thou make answer to an angry master."
"O speak that which is soft while he is uttering that which
is of wrath."
Maxims of Art.
The first thing, then, after leaving their honeymoon woods, was to find a suitable house for the new venture. In the press of work that greeted him on his return, Westenra found it impossible to give much time to house-hunting, so this business practically devolved upon Val. Behold her, then, utterly inexperienced in the conditions of American life, and without a glimmering of intuition as to the requirements of an up-to-date nursing home--whose ideal was a life in the wilds, sharing the sunshine or the shade of a tree with her beloved, whose domestic requirements vaguely included a pot and a blanket, who would have been more at home on the veldt tracking a buck for dinner--rushing from one end to the other of the most neoteric city in the world, inspecting houses with "every modern improvement," weighing the advantages of furnace-heating as compared to steam-heating, examining "open-work plumbing" and "bathroom extensions," peering into kitchen ranges and domestic offices, interesting herself in the things from which all her life instinct had bade her fly, and from which she had fled!
But love was hers and a whole-hearted devotion to Westenra's interests that even he could not quench, though he did his best. Nowhere could she discover a house that pleased him. Every time she found something she thought ideal, he would emerge for a few hours from his office and completely demolish her hopes. Picking her find to pieces point by point, he would thereafter retire and leave her to commence the search anew.
Few things are more wearing to body and soul than a prolonged course of house-hunting in a large city. There is nothing in the process to feed the soul and everything to tire the body. At the end of a month Val's spirits were several degrees below zero, and though her smile was undaunted, there were signs of physical fatigue on her that did not escape her husband's practised eye. He rarely saw her now except in the evenings, for always with the resolution to shut down firmly on his old life and its (for the moment) vain aspirations, he decided against going back, even temporarily, to his bachelor quarters and letting her share them, and had instead taken quiet rooms uptown, near the locality in which he hoped to find a house. Here he sought her whenever he could escape from the practice which he was now nursing with assiduity, but it was nearly always late at night, and at such times she was nearly half dead with fatigue, although she tried to disguise the fact under a gay air. Westenra's heart was sore for her, but he could not quite understand the position. He had realised that, in spite of her nerves, she was anything but a delicate woman, and it puzzled and vaguely disappointed him that she should knock under so soon. He knew nothing of the wandering dryad in her nature with whom she struggled in the house-hunt, trying to school it to the prospect of life in a nursing home; how the clang and clamour of New York's street cars, railways, and fire-bells dazzled and wearied her; how the actual effort to bear with these things and keep her trouble to herself wore her down. In a very few weeks more, however, a reason that sufficed him for her fatigue was made clear. She told him one night as they drove home from the Metropolitan Opera House. They had locked up the house-hunting problem for a few hours and forgotten it in the enchantment of a Beethoven concert. With the glamour of the 17th Sonata still on them, making stormy echoes in their hearts, she leaned her face to his in the darkness, and gave him the dear and wonderful news.
"Since when?" he asked, thrilling into tenderness and some other poignant sense he had never known in all his life.