"Er—ah—" broke in the dismayed husband.
But the visitor advanced quietly, still with that same grave smile, and clasped Mrs. Denby's extended hand.
"I am very sure Burke's friends are, indeed, very glad to meet you," he said. "Certainly I am," he finished, with a cordial heartiness so nicely balanced that even Burke Denby's sensitive alertness could find in it neither the overzealousness of insincerity nor the indifference of disdain.
Even when, a minute later, they turned and went into the living room, Burke's still apprehensive watchfulness could detect in his friend's face not one trace of the dismayed horror he had been dreading to see there.
"Gleason's a brick," he sighed to himself, trying to relax his tense muscles. "As if I didn't know that every last gimcrack in this miserable room would fairly scream at him the moment he entered that door!"
In spite of everybody's very evident efforts to have everything pass off pleasantly, the evening was anything but a success. Helen, at first shy and ill at ease, said little. Then, as if suddenly realizing her deficiencies as a hostess, she tried to remedy it by talking very loud and very fast about anything that came into her mind, reveling especially in minute details concerning their own daily lives, ranging all the way from stories of the elopement and the house-furnishing on the installment plan to hilarious accounts of her experiences with the cookbook and the account-book.
Very plainly Helen was doing her best to "show off." From one to the other she looked, with little nods and coquettish smiles.
To Gleason her manner said: "You see now why Burke fell in love with me, don't you?" To Burke it said: "There, now I guess you ain't ashamed of me!"
The doctor, still with the grave smile and kindly eyes, listened politely, uttering now and then a pleasant word or two, in a way that even the distraught husband could not criticize. As for the husband himself, between his anger at Helen and his anger at himself because of his anger at Helen, he was in a woeful condition of nervousness and ill-humor. Vainly trying to wrest the ball of conversation from Helen's bungling fingers, he yet felt obliged to laugh in apparent approval at her wild throws. Nor was he unaware of the sorry figure he thus made of himself. Having long since given up all hope of the anticipated chat with his friend, his one aim now was to get the visit over, and the doctor out of the house as soon as possible. Yet the very fact that he did want the visit over and the doctor gone only angered him the more, and put into his mouth words that were a mockery of cordiality. No wonder, then, that for Burke the evening was a series of fidgetings, throat-clearings, and nervous laughs that (if he had but known it) were fully as distressing to the doctor as they were to himself.
At half-past nine the doctor rose to his feet.