“If you’re not too tired, Gilbert, won’t you come down here for dinner? The garden is so lovely.”
“Suppose you come home,” he said, surlily, but it was only an instinctive reaction; the bear hitting out with his paw.
“Do come,” she said, pleasantly. “It would be nice to be by ourselves. And the garden—”
“Very well! Very well!” he said. “I’ll come. I can’t spend the morning at the telephone. I’ll come, Claudine. Good-by.”
Now this disturbed him. He was inclined to suspect, with reason, all advances made by his family, and yet he liked these advances. He felt fairly sure that his wife had some favour to ask, some feminine chicanery to execute, but he was like a king with his courtiers; he was grimly contemptuous of all this beguilement, but he relished the homage.
The idea of going back to that house on the hill to see Claudine stirred in him old and unpleasant memories. He felt himself no phantom; he was poignantly aware of the passing of twenty years and youth with them; he didn’t feel that he had not tried, but that he had not succeeded. He had made money, just as he had intended, but the rewards of his activity had been unjustly withheld. He had the wrong sort of wife, the wrong sort of children, the wrong sort of life altogether. Still he would do the right thing, as he had always done. He stopped on his way to the ferry and bought Claudine a five-pound box of chocolates, the kinds she hated most and which he had bought for years and years, never being undeceived.
§ iii
But long before he got there, all Claudine’s plans had been upset. She had gone about all the morning, seriously intent upon her scheme to win back her husband. This, she felt, was the first step along her new road; once he was won back, she would make him into something different, as it was her womanly duty to do; she would take him to concerts and persuade him to read. She had that idea common to good and inexperienced women, of the fascination she might wield if she chose, an idea in no way related to vanity, but a conception necessary to existence. She had never yet consciously tried to be fascinating, but at the back of her mind had always been the thought of how powerful she might be, if she weren’t so nice. She was obliged to believe this. If Gilbert, by analogy, had realized when he went out to lunch, that perhaps seven out of ten men that he passed could have knocked him flat on his back, he couldn’t have endured life; he had to believe that he could hold his own, if he wanted. And she, too, must have her belief in her mystic power.
She had been sitting down to a delightful, solitary lunch; the dining-room with its shining waxed floor and well-polished mahogany furniture, the yellow roses in a great Delft bowl, the dim, cool peace all about her, filled her with serenity and courage. Certainly she would change Gilbert and everything else in her life; she intended to ask him to stop here with her for the rest of the summer; a real sacrifice, for it meant the end of this delicate and immaterial existence, and a hateful preoccupation with roasts and wines and laundry. Edna had gone to Easthampton with the Ryders, Bertie was away with Lance; Miss Dorothy could have the Brooklyn house to herself. This transplanting would make her work easier, but she realized that she would have to be notably charming in order to win his consent. She thought a good deal about what she should wear; she was engaged in this when Al came in. He was very hot and crumpled and cheerful.
“Oh ... Alfred!” she cried. “Andrée ...?”