It came into her mind to say, "I care for you more than I knew." But his friend the conductor was thrusting him up the steps of the car. "I wish I had said it," thought she, watching the train disappear round the curve. "I'll write it."
But she did not. When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not fit in with the other things she was setting down. "I think I do care for him—as a friend," she decided. "If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am. Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, "Oh, yes, he does care! And without his love how wretched I'd be! What a greedy I am—wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.
And she was lonely without him. If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them. Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology. But he did not come; and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing that was begins to be as if it had not been.
He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly, eager for the chance to burst forth. And he had roused it when he would not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself.
As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del began to see much of Henrietta Hastings. Grandfather Fuller was now dead and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had the habit of saying that "If Hastings had some of his wife's 'get up' he wouldn't be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for himself." In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's forgotten or disdained.
Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta's energy, like her own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended class, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed. And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable classes, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves. They laughed at the "culture craze" which, raging westward, had seized upon all the women of Saint X with incomes, or with husbands or fathers to support them in idleness—the craze for thinking, reading, and talking cloudily or muddily on cloudy or muddy subjects. Henrietta and Adelaide jeered; yet they were themselves the victims of another, and, if possible, more poisonous, bacillus of the same sluggard family.
One morning Adelaide, in graceful ease in her favorite nook in the small northwest portico of the club house, was reading a most imposingly bound and illustrated work on Italian architecture written by a smatterer for smatterers. She did a great deal of reading in this direction because it was also the direction of her talent, and so she could make herself think she was getting ready to join in Dory's work when he returned. She heard footsteps just round the corner, and looked up. She and Ross Whitney were face to face.
There was no chance for evasion. He, with heightened color, lifted his hat; she, with a nonchalance that made her proud of herself, smiled and stretched out her hand. "Hello, Ross," said she, languidly friendly. "When did you come to town?" And she congratulated herself that her hair had gone up so well that morning and that her dress was one of her most becoming—from Paris, from Paquin—a year old, it is true, but later than the latest in Saint X and fashionable even for Sherry's at lunch time.
Ross, the expert, got himself together and made cover without any seeming of scramble; but his not quite easy eyes betrayed him to her. "About two hours ago," replied he.
"Is Theresa with you?" She gazed tranquilly at him as she fired this center shot. She admired the coolness with which he received it.