Grinning to rekindle his courage, he started tiptoeing back along the hall to his bedroom and his kitchen, and rolled up his sleeves and began to clean house most furiously; for even if you are quite desperately in love, and a fairly good man besides, it is just a little bit crowded-feeling and disconcerting to have the lady walk unannounced right into your life and your neckties and your pictures, to say nothing of your last week's unwashed cream-jars.
Frantically struggling with his coffee-pot at seven o'clock, he had almost forgotten his minor troubles when a little short, gaspy breath sound made him look up. Huddling her tired-out dress into the ample folds of his dressing-gown, Ruth stood watching him bashfully.
"Hello!" he said. "Who are you?"
"I'm—Mrs.—Andrew Bernard, attorney at law," she announced with stuttering nonchalance, and started off exploringly for the cupboard to find Drew's best green Canton china to deck the kitchen breakfast table. All through the tortuous little meal she sat in absolute tongue-tied gravity, carving her omelet into a hundred infinitesimal pieces and sipping like a professional coffee-taster at Drew's over-rank concoction. Only once did her solemn face lighten with an inspirational flash that made Drew's heart jump. Then, "Oh, Drew," she exclaimed, "do you think you could go out to the house to-day and see if they fed the lamb?"
"No, I don't," said Drew bluntly, and poured himself out his fifth cup of coffee.
After breakfast, all the time that he was shaving, she came and sat on the edge of a table and watched him with the same maddening gravity, and when he finally started off for his office she followed him down the whole length of his little hallway. "I like my cave!" she volunteered with sudden sociability, and then with a great, pink-flushing wave of consciousness she lifted up her face to him and stammered, "Do I kiss you good-by?"
Drew shook his head and laughed. "No," he said, "you don't even have to do that; I'm not much of a kisser," and turned abruptly and grabbed at the handle of the door.
But before he had crossed the threshold she reached out and pulled him back for a moment, and he had to stoop down very far to hear what she wanted to tell him. "It's nothing much, Drew," she whispered. "It's nothing much at all. I just wanted to say that—considering how strong they are, and how—wild—and strange—I think men are—very—gentle creatures. Thank you." And in another instant she had gone back alone to face by crass daylight the tragedy that she had brought into three people's lives.
Certainly in all the days and weeks that followed, Drew never failed to qualify as a "gentle creature." Not a day passed at his office that he did not telephone home with the most casual-sounding pleasantry, "Is everything all right? Any burnt-bridge smoke in the air?" Usually, clear as his own voice, and sometimes even with a little giggle tucked on at the end, the answer came, "Yes, everything's all right." But now and then over that telephone wire a minor note flashed with unmistakably tremulous vibration: "N-o, Drew. Oh, could you come right home—and take me somewhere?"
Drew's brown cheeks hollowed a bit, perhaps, as time went on, but always smilingly, always frankly and jocosely, he met the occasionally recurrent emergencies of his love-life. Underneath his smile and underneath his frankness his original purpose never flinched and never wavered. With growing mental intimacy and absolute emotional aloofness he forced day by day the image and the consciousness of his personality upon the girl's plastic mind: his picture, for instance, as a matter of course for her locket; his favorite, rather odd, colors for her clothes; his sturdy, adventuresome, fleet-footed opinions to run ahead and break in all her strange new thought-grounds for her. More than this, in every possible way that showed to the world he stamped her definitely as the most carefully cherished wife among all her young married mates.