In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an individuality—a revelation of a woman’s beautiful mind, inspired by love.
“At last I have something to interest, to occupy me,” she said. “This is our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to me to keep it always like this.”
“You—degenerated into a household drudge,” he mocked. “Why, you used to laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of my ideals.”
“Did I?” she answered. “Well, as you would say, see what I’ve come to through living with—a member of the working-classes.”
Howard’s own particular part of this house included a library with a small study next to it. In the study was a most attractive table with plenty of room to spread about books and papers, a huge divan in the corner and a fire-place near by. He found himself doing more and more of his work at home. There were not so many interruptions as at the office, the beauty of the surroundings, the consciousness that “she” was not far away—all combined to keep him at home and to enable him to do more and better work there.
He was justly and greatly proud of her achievement; and where he used to be more regretful than he admitted even to himself when they had guests, he was now glad to see others about, admiring her taste, appreciating her skill as a hostess and giving him opportunities to look at her from an ever new point of view.
Of course these guests were almost all “their kind of people”—amiable, well mannered persons who thought and acted in that most conventional of moulds, the mould of “good society.” They fitted into the surroundings, they did their part toward making those surroundings luxurious—a “wallow of self-complacent content.” And this environment soon suited and fitted him exactly.
But to her he was still The Democrat. She loved him in the way and to the degree which her character, as the years had developed it, permitted her to love. And this love, or rather admiring respect, was wholly based upon her ideal of him, her belief in the honesty and intensity of his convictions. While she did not share them, she had breadth enough to admire them and to regard them as high removed above her own ideas to which for herself she held tenaciously, instinct and association and “tradition” triumphing over reason.
Howard retained his ideal of her, never examining her closely, never seeing or suspecting what a pale love she gave him and how shrivelled had become the part of her nature which she and he both assumed was most strongly developed. He knew how she idealised him and did not dare to undeceive her. Therefore he practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no single moment at which he could conveniently halt and “straighten the record.” At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had formerly put upon it. What if she should find him out?