I went to work. The sort of people who are ever on the lookout for some excuse for going to pieces, and the world is well sprinkled with them, eagerly seize on disappointment in love as precisely what they were seeking. At the risk of being thought cold and hard, I will say that it is extremely fortunate for Joan that she escaped the Darby who goes smash for disappointed love of her. If Joan had yielded to him, Darby would simply have been put to the trouble of finding another pretext for throwing up his job and taking to drink. I confess it did not occur to me to give up and fall to boozing and brooding. I should not have dared do that; for, you see, I was really in love—not with myself, but with Mary Kirkwood. I went to work. I filled my days and my evenings with business engagements that compelled both my time and my thought. I took on an extra secretary. I started to build a railway. I laid out an addition to the manufacturing city I had founded. I organized a farm for teaching city slum boys to be farmers. I engaged in several entirely new mining and manufacturing enterprises. The result was that when I went to bed, I slept; and when they awakened me in the morning my brain was at work before my head was well off the pillow. And still— You can distract your mind from the aching tooth, but it aches on.
All this time I was receiving weekly letters from Edna and Margot—long and loving letters. I read them, and you may possibly imagine I was filled with shame and remorse. Not at all. My wife and my daughter had rather exaggerated my vanity. Only vanity could gull a husband and father in my position into fancying himself the object of such luxuriant affection as those letters professed. If you have lies to tell, take my advice and don’t write them. I can’t explain the mystery, but a lie which, spoken and heard, passes out and passes in as smoothly as a greased shuttle in its greased groove, becomes a glaring falsehood when set down in black and white. The only effect of those letters upon me was to make my sick heart the sadder with the realization of what I had missed in losing Mary Kirkwood.
And I kept wondering what it was that Edna and Margot were slathering me for.
In September I got the key to the mystery. The necessity of floating some bonds took me abroad again. I found my family ensconced in beautiful luxury in an apartment in Paris. You drove out the Champs Elysées. Not far from the President’s palace you drove in at great doors—not gates, but doors—in a plain, unpretentious-looking house wall. You were in a superb garden of whose existence you had no hint from the street. Magnificent bronze inner doors—powdered and velveted lackeys—a majestic stairway leading to lofty and gorgeous corridors and salons. Really my wife, with the aid of those clever European professors of the aristocratic art, had educated herself amazingly. On every side there were evidences of her good taste in furniture, in tapestries, in wall coverings, in pictures. It was not the taste of a home maker, but it was unquestionably good taste. It was not the sort of taste I liked, but not to admire it would have been to lack the sense of harmony in line and color. And let me add in justice to her, it was her own taste. There is no mistaking the difference between the luxury that is merely bought and the luxury that is created.
I submitted with what grace I could muster to the exuberant hypocrisies of that greeting. But I got to business with all speed. “In the note I found in London you said you had a surprise for me,” I said to Edna. “What is it?”
“How impatient you are,” laughed she. “Just like a child.”
Whether because the fashions of the day happened to be peculiarly becoming or because she had actually improved, she now had the loveliness more exquisite than I had ever seen in woman. No doubt her piquant face had charm for most people; for me it had none whatever. I knew too well what lay beneath—or, rather, what was not there, for like most human beings her defects of character were not so much the presence of the vices as the lack of the virtues.
“I’ve been waiting for that surprise several months,” said I. “Your letters and Margot’s showed that some shock was coming.”
“Shock? No, indeed!” And she and Margot laughed gayly. “It isn’t altogether a surprise,” she went on. “Can’t you guess?”