They stood gazing at each other through a moment curiously charged with something neither had foreseen or suspected.
Slowly a look of sharper lordliness crept into his eyes. “Stella,” he said, “I’m determined to build up an establishment. We ought to put on more style, even if we are living ’way out here. A little later I may train one of the Ainu men for a personal valet.” He smiled a rather brittle smile. “Do you think they’re pliable enough? It’s necessary to keep these savages impressed,” he went on, “for the sake of morale, if nothing else. Anyway—call it a whim, if you want to—I’ve taken a dislike to having my dear little wife washing dishes and beating mats.” It came back to her with great vividness how he had frowned and closed his eyes the morning she had put on her finery to please him. But, smiling a slow, calm, magisterial smile, he added: “What do you think the world would say if it could listen to you objecting to help about the house, with the servant problem what it is in civilized places?”
IV
Had he refrained from smiling, or if he had just simply and humorously smiled, she would undoubtedly have let the matter drop there. But something new in the glint of his eye and the self-willed curl of his lips struck an unexpected flint within Stella. Her own eyes gleamed a little, and she grew whiter.
“If we had the kind of big town house I once pictured, it would be a very different thing. But here we are on this island instead, and you don’t know what my housework has come to mean or you wouldn’t talk of sending up Ainu women to take it away from me!”
“Don’t carry on like a child, Stella,” he said, with a little heat. For, though there was sense in her words, he did not like the tone. It hadn’t a traditional ring, and—well, he didn’t like it.
“I’m not carrying on like a child.” Her voice sounded strained to her, and she was growing a bit hysterical. “Please tell them not to come.”
He whistled softly, and after a rather tense pause announced: “They’re coming early in the morning, Stella.” There was a fling of his finely sculptured head.
“Then you’ll have to take charge of them!” she blazed out, with a flash of spirit which checked and amazed him. It was the first gauntlet of their life together—a gauntlet surcharged with fiendish irony.