“Why try to lie to myself?” he thought. “It’s never a question of what one has done but always of what one could have and should have done. I am thirty and I have been marking time for at least four years. Preparing by study and reading? Yes, but not preparing for anything.”
On the whole he was glad that Alice had refused to marry him. Her reason was valid. But there was another which he thought she did not see. He was deceived as to the depth of her insight because he did not watch her closely. He had no suspicion how many, many times, in their moments of demonstrativeness, she listened for those words which never came, listened and turned away to hide from him the disappointment in her eyes.
He did not love her—and she knew it. She did not inspire ambition in him—and she knew it. She simply kept him comfortable and contented. She simply prevented his amatory instincts from gathering strength vigorously to renew that search which men and women keep up incessantly until they find what they seek. She knew this also but never permitted herself to see it clearly.
He was pleased with her but not proud of her. He was not exactly ashamed of his relation with her but—well, he never relaxed his precautions for keeping it conventionally concealed. He still had a room at his club and occupied it occasionally. He laughed at himself, despised himself in a—gentle, soothing way. But he excused himself to himself with earnestness despite his sarcasms at his own expense. And for the most of the time he was content—so well, so comfortably content that if his mind had not been so nervously active he would have taken on the form and look of settled middle-life.
There was just the one saving quality—his mental alertness. All his life he had had insatiable intellectual curiosity. It had kept him from wasting his time at play when he was a boy. It had kept him from plunging deeply into dissipation when youth was hot in his veins. It was now keeping him from the sluggard’s fate.
On the last day of January—six weeks after his thirtieth birthday—he came home earlier than usual, as they were going to the theatre and were to dine at seven. He found Alice in bed and the doctor sitting beside her.
“You’ll have to get some one else to go with you, I’m afraid,” she said with good-humoured resignation, a trifle over-acted. “My cold is worse and the doctor says I must stay in bed.”
“Nothing serious?” Howard asked anxiously, for her cheeks were flaming.
“Oh, no. Just the cold. And I am taking care of myself.”