CHAPTER XXXIII
She longed more and more to go abroad again.
"As soon as ever you please," said Ethan.
How good he was to her! How he indulged her! How wonderful it was to be loved by such a man! Soon they'd be off again on their travels, seeing the beautiful Old World. Oh, Life was keeping her promises every one!
Five days after the talk about Julia came a letter from Mother Joachim, saying that Emmie's health was quite restored, but that she was inflexible about not seeing her sister. Mother Joachim herself thought it best that, for a year or so, nothing more should be said of the proposed meeting. Perhaps the girl would be willing to see her friends before taking the black veil.
With a joy, for which Val, thinking of her sister, reproached herself, she and Ethan had begun to lay their plans for a winter in Italy. Suddenly, without reason as it appeared to her, his interest seemed to falter, his good spirits to flicker out.
Although even Val would not have denied that her husband could, if put to it, produce at any moment of the day or night the blackest charges against the order of the world, he had not hitherto proved a depressing person to live with. Like certain other unsanguine souls, he was a pleasanter companion than many an arrant optimist.
This was more certainly the case when politics were a little in the background. Val longed to see the subject banned. It seemed the one thing that took Ethan quite out of her sphere, and kept him in some world of scorn and indignation, at whose borders her smiling jurisdiction stopped.
"No more politics!" she said to Tom Scherer when he appeared after breakfast the morning after the letter had come from Mother Joachim. "I've come to the conclusion that it's bad for the digestion to talk bribery and corruption night after night till the small hours."