But he was too late. The woman entered, searching the room with a piercing, suspicious gaze. At once I saw, behind that look, a jealousy that pounced on every object that came into its view, and studied it with a hope that feared and a fear that hoped. When her eyes had toured the room, they paused upon him, seemed to be saying: “You've baffled me again, but I'm not discouraged. I shall catch you yet.”
“Well, my dear?” said Langdon, whom she seemed faintly to amuse. “It's only Mr. Blacklock. Mr. Blacklock, my wife.”
I bowed; she looked coldly at me, and her slight nod was more than a hint that she wished to be left alone with her husband.
I said to him: “Well, I'll be off. Thank you for—”
“One moment,” he interrupted. Then to his wife: “Anything special?”
She flushed. “No—nothing special. I just came to see you. But if I am disturbing you—as usual—”
“Not at all,” said he. “When Blacklock and I have finished, I'll come to you. It won't be longer than an hour—or so.”
“Is that all?” she said almost savagely. Evidently she was one of those women who dare not make “scenes” with their husbands in private and so are compelled to take advantage of the presence of strangers to ease their minds. She was an extremely pretty woman, would have been beautiful but for the worn, strained, nervous look that probably came from her jealousy. She was small in stature; her figure was approaching that stage at which a woman is called “well rounded” by the charitable, fat by the frank and accurate. A few years more and she would be hunting down and destroying early photographs. There was in the arrangement of her hair and in the details of her toilet—as well as in her giving way to her tendency to fat—that carelessness that so many women allow themselves, once they are safely married to a man they care for.
“Curious,” thought I, “that being married to him should make her feel secure enough of him to let herself go, although her instinct is warning her all the time that she isn't in the least sure of him. Her laziness must be stronger than her love—her laziness or her vanity.”
While I was thus sizing her up, she was reluctantly leaving. She didn't even give me the courtesy of a bow—whether from self-absorption or from haughtiness I don't know; probably from both. She was a Western woman, and when those Western women do become perverts to New York's gospel of snobbishness, they are the worst snobs in the push. Langdon, regardless of my presence, looked after her with a faintly amused, faintly contemptuous expression that—well, it didn't fit in with my notion of what constitutes a gentleman. In fact, I didn't know which of them had come off the worse in that brief encounter in my presence. It was my first glimpse of a fashionable behind-the-scenes, and it made a profound impression upon me—an impression that has grown deeper as I have learned how much of the typical there was in it. Dirt looks worse in the midst of finery than where one naturally expects to find it—looks worse, and is worse.