Some occult sense warned him of the time. He glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece, and caught sight of his own face in the mirror behind it. And he wondered, as he always did when he really, consciously regarded himself, how it was he looked like that, how it was possible that his appearance should so little express himself. It was another cause for resentment.
A heavy, grizzled man of forty-five with a straggling little mustache over a brutally obstinate month. He had a surly way about him, but he was not unattractive; on the contrary, there was something about the gloomy and bilious gaze of his black eyes that engendered pity and good-will.
But neither pity nor good-will dwelt in Miss Dorothy at that particular instant. She was not resentful, because resentment didn’t belong in her stock of feelings, but she was miserable. He was upsetting all her neat little plans for the day, he was keeping back Delia. He was so late, why on earth didn’t he get up and be off to his office, where he belonged? Every moment of these days was so precious to her, when she was sole and undisputed mistress in this house which she had always regarded with awe. She could wish that the summer would last forever, and Claudine and the children never return. Think of the joy of going to market in the electric coupé! Think of the charm of eating her lunch alone, benevolent chatelaine of all this domain!
At last, with his terribly rough gesture, he shoved away the plates before him, so that they upset a milk jug, pushed back his chair in a way that made furrows in the carpet, and got up. He went heavily upstairs and took his straw hat from the gigantic hat-rack. He frowned, there was something he didn’t like about that dark hall, with the rug removed for the summer. There were certain changes from his mother’s day, the glass top of the front door was covered with shirred green silk, and over the open door of the front parlour hung a portière of bamboo tubes strung together with green and blue glass beads, hung there fifteen summers ago. On the shelf of the hat-rack was a little rubber plant in a horrible green scalloped bowl, and a clumsy bronze statue of a fat shepherd boy, holding out an altogether incongruous little tray for visiting cards, a wedding anniversary present from his senior partner. Each of these objects per se he regarded with more or less admiration, but the ensemble disgusted him. He felt that there was something wrong here, and that it was of course his wife’s fault. He execrated her in silence.
He set off down the tranquil street, blazing in the July sun, removing his hat now and then to salute a familiar face. He knew so many people in the neighbourhood, through having lived there all his life, but they were not his friends, these people. They respected him as a man who paid his bills promptly and provided well for his family, but they didn’t like him, had no warm feeling for him. He was too gloomy, too preoccupied. He had an air of misery about him which was distressing to a hostess. Claudine was obliged to confess, and to apologize for his reluctance to make visits. She said he was such a man’s man! He was only happy among his business associates. But what she didn’t know, what nobody suspected, was the positive hatred concealed beneath his farouche manner for all these respectable people. He despised them and loathed them, and was mortally sick of them, and worst of all, he couldn’t feel justified in such feelings. Theoretically they were what he admired, and he couldn’t see in what way he differed from them, and, yet he knew that he did. This feeling, like all his other feelings, he kept gloomily to himself.
He jumped on a crowded car going across the bridge, very hot, very angry at being jostled, and was carried off to New York, to make more money....
§ iii
Not only at home were his moods known and respected, at his office it was a recognized thing that the early morning was a bad time for him, and that it was most unwise to disturb him. As usual he strode through the outer office and shut himself into his own small room, without exchanging a word or even a nod. He looked through his mail which had been opened and neatly sorted for him, then pushed it aside, staring after it with a distrait and wretched look. He couldn’t put his mind on it, he hated every detail, every possibility.
“Why the devil am I slaving away here?” he asked himself. “Working day in and day out, so that she can go flaunting in fine clothes and idling away the whole summer up there in the mountains.”
He remembered the extensive wardrobe Claudine had taken with her. Never did she suspect, never could she have suspected, how he resented it. The primeval male in him would deny all luxuries to the unloved woman.