She went out, waited for him while he locked the door. "Dick," she began again, as they walked along the path, "I don't want to be shut out of any part of your life, least of all out of the realest part. I want to be truly your wife."
No answer. She glanced up at him; obviously his thoughts were far away.
She slipped her arms through his. "Tell me what you're thinking about, dear."
"About that test I was making."
"What was it?"
"Oh, nothing. Is the house satisfactory? How do you like old Nanny?" As she did not answer, he looked down at her. "Why, what's the matter with my little sweetheart? Such a discontented expression!"
"Nothing—nothing at all," replied she, forcing a smile and steadying her quivering lip.
"I'm afraid those two days on the train——"
"Yes," she interrupted eagerly. "And I guess I'm hungry, too. That's very upsetting."
With a little forcing she kept up the semblance of good spirits through breakfast and until he was off to the laboratory again. Then she gave way to her mood—for it could be only a mood. With old Nanny as guide, she went through the house, through all its spacious solidly and stiffly furnished rooms. At every step Nanny had something to say of Miss Eudosia—how good Miss Eudosia had been, how Miss Eudosia kept everything as her mother had it before her, how particular Miss Eudosia had been. And when it wasn't Miss Eudosia it was Colonel 'Kill—that splendid-looking, terrible-looking old Achilles Vaughan; as a child she had decided that the awful god the family worshiped must look like Achilles Vaughan. Nanny talked on and on; Courtney's spirits went down and down. In one respect the house should have appealed to her—in its perfect order. For she had inherited from her mother a passion for order—an instinct that would have a neatly kept ribbon box almost as soon as she could talk, and had prompted her, long before she could talk distinctly, to cry if they tried to put on her a dress the least bit mussed or a stocking with a hole in it. But there is the order that is of life, and there is the order that is of death. This Vaughan order seemed to her to be of death. She felt surrounded, hemmed in, menaced by a throng of the Vaughan women of past generations—those women of the old-fashioned kind, thoughtless, mindless, cool, and correct and inane—the kind of women the Vaughan men liked—the kind Richard liked—"No—no. He does not like that kind!"