Kate returned the stare. Through the half-open door came the smell of chronic cooking; a mournful waterproof hung against the wall. “Major Fenno—here?”
Major Fenno; yes; the woman repeated it. Mr. Chris they always called him, she added with a toothless smile. Of course he lived there; she kinder thought he was upstairs now. His mother, she added gratuitously, had gone out—stepped round to the market, she reckoned. She’d go and look for Mr. Chris. Would the lady please walk in?
Kate was shown into a small dull sitting-room. All she remembered of it afterward was that there were funny tufted armchairs, blinds half down, a rosewood “what-not,” and other relics of vanished ease. Above the fireless chimney stood a too handsome photograph of Chris in uniform.
After all, it was natural enough to find that he was living there. He had always hated any dependence on other people’s plans and moods; she remembered how irritably he had spoken of his servitude as Mr. Maclew’s secretary, light as the yoke must be. And it was like him, since he was settled in Baltimore, to have returned to his parents. There was something in him—on the side she had always groped for, and occasionally known in happy glimpses—that would make him dislike to live in luxury in the same town in which his father and mother were struggling on the scant income his own follies had reduced them too. He would probably never relate cause and effect, or be much troubled if he did; he would merely say to himself: “It would be beastly wallowing in things here, when it’s such hard sledding for the old people”—in the same tone in which he used to say to Kate, on their lazy Riviera Sundays: “If I were at home now I’d be getting ready to take the old lady to church. I always go with her.” And no doubt he did. He loved his parents tenderly whenever they were near enough to be loved.
There was a step in the passage. She turned with a start and he came in. At sight of her he closed the door quickly. He was very pale. “Kate!” he said, stopping on the threshold. She had been standing in the window, and she remained there, the width of the room between them. She was silenced by the curious deep shock of remembrance that his actual presence always gave her, and began to tremble lest it should weaken her resolve. “Didn’t you expect me?” she finally said.
He looked at her as if he hardly saw her. “Yes; I suppose I did,” he answered at length in a slow dragging voice. “I was going to write; to ask when I could see you.” As he stood there he seemed like some one snatched out of a trance. To her surprise she felt him singularly in her power. Their parts were reversed for the first time, and she said to herself: “I must act quickly, before he can collect himself.” Aloud she asked: “What have you got to say?”
“To say—” he began; and then, suddenly, with a quick change of voice, and moving toward her with outstretched hands: “For God’s sake don’t take that tone. It’s bad enough....”
She knew every modulation; he had pleaded with her so often before! His trying it now only hardened her mind and cleared her faculties; and with that flash of vision came the sense that she was actually seeing him for the first time. There he stood, stripped of her dreams, while she registered in a clear objective way all the strength and weakness, the flaws and graces of his person, marked the premature thinning of his smooth brown hair, the incipient crows’-feet about the lids, their too tender droop over eyes not tender enough, and that slight slackness of the mouth that had once seemed a half-persuasive pout, and was now only a sign of secret uncertainties and indulgences. She saw it all, and under the rich glaze of a greater prosperity, a harder maturity, a prompter self-assurance and resourcefulness, she reached to the central failure.
That was what she became aware of—and aware too that the awful fact of actually seeing another human being might happen to one for the first time only after years of intimacy. She averted her eyes as from a sight not meant for her.
“It’s bad enough,” she heard him repeat.