He noticed everything, or almost everything, and he praised her; yet his praise lacked something for which she longed. It was sincere, but it had no enthusiasm. In some way she failed.
She had always accepted Paul’s theories without reservation. It seemed reasonable to her that Paul should wish to find a helpmeet and comrade in his wife, and it also seemed reasonable to believe that Paul really knew what he wanted. When she made of herself exactly what he said he wanted, it seemed reasonable to expect that he would be satisfied; and yet he wasn’t. He tried not to show it, but he wasn’t.
IV
One evening Christine decided to make apple fritters. Not that she so little understood Paul as to imagine that fritters, even if made with apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, would move him to tenderness, or that she was so stupid and so gross as to think any sort of cooking a solution for spiritual problems; but he liked the things, and she liked to please him, even in the smallest way.
When he came home, she met him at the door, with the smile and the casual air she knew best suited him. She didn’t ask him to hurry with his interminable routine of washing and changing his clothes, because it did not agree with him to hurry, and he could not, even when he tried. Instead, she wisely made due allowance for that time, and when at last she heard him coming down the stairs, she dropped the first spoonful of batter into the frying pan—
Paul heard her scream, and flew to her, but she had already flung a box of salt into the blazing fat, and she turned toward him, smiling again; only it was a distorted and piteous smile.
“What’s the matter?” he cried. “What happened, Christy, darling?”
“Nothing,” she answered, struggling with an anguish nearly intolerable. “The fat blazed up, and I burned myself a little—that’s all.”
“Let me see!” he demanded.
She held out her pretty arm, cruelly scalded. Paul was beside himself. He tele[Pg 67]phoned for the doctor and then set to work to assuage her pain, with the best intentions in the world, but without much skill. He spilled a great deal of linseed oil on Christine’s frock and on the rug, he put a frightfully thick and clumsy bandage about her arm, and he got cologne into her eyes, while trying to relieve a headache which did not exist.