The two friends were together in Lizzie’s little morning-room—the room she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat there, she could hear Deering’s step as he paced up and down before his easel in the studio she had built for him. His step had been less regularly audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of wedded bliss, he had somehow failed to settle down to the great work which was to result from that privileged state; but even when she did not hear him she knew that he was there, above her head, stretched out on the old divan from Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes while he skimmed the morning papers; and the sense of his nearness had not yet lost its first keen edge of bliss.
Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous task than the study of the morning’s news. She had never unlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her husband’s character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang as they would. She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first menage; but now she knew that, though he basked under the rule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work. He liked to see things fall into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend were now dealing.
Before them stood two travel-worn trunks and a distended portmanteau, which had shed their contents in heterogeneous heaps over Lizzie’s rosy carpet. They represented the hostages left by her husband on his somewhat precipitate departure from a New York boarding-house, and indignantly redeemed by her on her learning, in a curt letter from his landlady, that the latter was not disposed to regard them as an equivalent for the arrears of Deering’s board.
Lizzie had not been shocked by the discovery that her husband had left America in debt. She had too sad an acquaintance with the economic strain to see any humiliation in such accidents; but it offended her sense of order that he should not have liquidated his obligation in the three years since their marriage. He took her remonstrance with his usual disarming grace, and left her to forward the liberating draft, though her delicacy had provided him with a bank-account which assured his personal independence. Lizzie had discharged the duty without repugnance, since she knew that his delegating it to her was the result of his good-humored indolence and not of any design on her exchequer. Deering was not dazzled by money; his altered fortunes had tempted him to no excesses: he was simply too lazy to draw the check, as he had been too lazy to remember the debt it canceled.
“No, dear! No!” Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher. “Can’t you find something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there? Where’s the beaded bag you had in your hand just now? I don’t think it could hurt him to lick that.”
Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through the slough of frayed garments and old studio properties. Before the group of mother and son she fell into a raptured attitude.
“Do look at him reach for it, the tyrant! Isn’t he just like the young Napoleon?”
Lizzie laughed and swung her son in air. “Dangle it before him, Andora. If you let him have it too quickly, he won’t care for it. He’s just like any man, I think.”
Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings closed his masterful fist upon it. “There—my Chelsea’s safe!” Lizzie smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watching him stagger away with his booty.
Andora stood beside her, watching too. “Have you any idea where that bag came from, Lizzie?”