“She! In her silk dresses—loafing all day long—servants to wait on her, never does a useful thing! Good God! Think of the time and leisure she’s got, and she doesn’t even read the papers! Not even charitable! Useless, through and through.... Where would she be if it weren’t for me? She’s got everything she wants, without raising a finger for it. Food, clothes, jewels, money to spend, fool women to jabber with—”
It seemed to him quite intolerable to think of her privileges; he couldn’t have endured it at all if he hadn’t had a certain very curious consolation for his grievances. His delight was to picture his wife as cast away upon a desert island, and he gloated over her utter futility there. He could imagine how helpless she would be, how incongruous, she with her fastidiousness, her chilly dignity. She wouldn’t be able to make herself dresses out of grass, sewing with a thorn for a needle. She wouldn’t know how, and couldn’t learn how, to grind flour from exotic roots, to tame birds, to construct houses. Incurably romantic Gilbert! That was his test for any woman; how she would look and behave on his classic desert isle. She must be lovely, strong, and young, and she must be altogether daring and brave and unwifelike, she must be resourceful and full of alluring wiles, she must urgently need him, and yet be entirely independent.
He glanced at the clock, took up his hat, and went out to a celebrated café near by, had two whiskies and soda, and immediately felt much better. He would confess to you that he was rather too dependent upon “bracers,” but like all that army, he was merely waiting for a propitious day to renounce the thing entirely. Some day when he wasn’t worried or depressed. No hurry about it; it didn’t interfere with his business, and it helped him beyond measure through his fits of awful despondency. He was willing to admit that perhaps his health might be better if he drank less, but he couldn’t become really interested in his health.
He chatted with the other ten o’clock frequenters of the bar, whom he knew very well, for they came with great regularity. He felt ready for business now; he went back—in fact, he now entered the office officially for the first time, in his proper character, nodded genially to the cashier and to his stenographer, an ambitious young Cuban, and began to pace up and down the big sample room, planning his autumn campaign and reviewing his “line.” A very fine line this year; he looked upon it with satisfaction as it lay spread out before him on a big counter sloping steeply on both sides and divided into little compartments filled with red rubber cows and white rubber horses, big, brightly colored balls and tiny hard rubber ones, dolls in knitted dresses, rattles, teething rings. There were among these several novelties which he considered very promising....
“A gentleman to see you!” said the young Cuban, with his alert and zealous air.
“Who?”
“Mr. MacGregor.”
“Don’t know him. Where’s he from?”
“Didn’t say,” replied the young Cuban, with a creditable imitation of his chief’s brusque business-like tone.
“Bring him in!” said Gilbert.