“I had to—talk to someone,” she said. “And there was nobody else.”
“But—” he began, and stopped. This was a matter for caution, she who had a husband, a mother, a father, brothers and sisters, and yet could find no one but himself to confide in.
Five years before, when he was a boy of twenty, he had come to live with his uncle, Doctor Mason. He was a youth of strongly scientific tendency, too poor to study, and the doctor had offered to keep him. His mother was a garrulous, vulgar woman, with a bitter tongue, well able to make life a burden for her household. Her husband, the doctor’s younger brother, endured her with English fatalism; he was an ineffectual sort of chap, anyway, who like so many of his countrymen had turned to farming in the hope of finding in it a refuge from competition and struggle. He had a wretched, stony, hillside farm in Sullivan County, which produced next to nothing; the family were kept alive only by the exertions of his relentless wife and the boundless charity of his brother. Lance, amazingly christened Launcelot—had lived in calm, unceasing opposition to both parents. He would be a paleontologist, and he would not devote himself to money-making. If he did make anything through that work, his parents could have it, if he didn’t they would have to do without.
He was the most unimpressionable, unsusceptible young man ever born. Nothing moved him, nothing troubled him. He was a pleasant housemate, for he was never impatient or cross, but he remained marvelously aloof. He sat at the doctor’s feet, worshipping his scientific knowledge, grateful to him for the opportunities he had given him, the years in college, the quiet and peace for independent study, he was grateful to his aunt, too, for her kindly care of him. But he would have been delighted to go to the ends of the earth on an expedition, and it wouldn’t have cost him a pang to bid them farewell forever.
The only soul with whom he was really human was Claudine. They had been like brother and sister, only at once more friendly and more formal than brothers and sisters usually are. And Claudine was quite conscious of something not at all brotherly in Lance’s regard. She had had too many suitors to be deceived. She had very carefully maintained a nice balance. She knew that he thought she didn’t know, and she was artful about it. She thoroughly respected Lance, he was the most candid, unbiased, truly independent person she had ever known, and he was kind, consistently and invariably kind, without effort, simply because it was his impulse to be so.
It was upon his candour, his intelligence, his kindness, that she counted now.
“Oh, Lance!” she said. “I’m so unhappy!”
“What’s the trouble?”
The waiter was hovering near.
“You’d better order something,” she murmured.