"You are so generous to me, Marshall! ... I am sorry it is so expensive to be sick. But I 'm getting better, dear—don't you see I am? I have n't felt so well for a year," she added.
"Oh, we 'll have you round again pretty soon," he said, with that hearty optimism which, one could not have told exactly why, seemed just to miss of the nature of sympathy. But Jean's drafts on sympathy had always been scanty. It was very much as it was about the lace curtains. She could get along without what other women demanded. At least, she had always thought she could. It used to be so. She was troubled sometimes to find that sickness creates new heavens and a new earth, and that the very virtues of health may turn again and rend one. It was as if one had acquired citizenship in a strange planet, where character and nature change places.
It was with a kind of fear that she received her husband's acceleration of tenderness. How was she to forego it, when the time came that it might—she omitted to acknowledge to herself that it would—overlook her again? She tried feverishly to get better in a hurry, as if she had been in some Southern climate where she was but a transient tourist. She tried so hard, in fact, as sometimes to check the real and remarkable improvement which had now befallen her.
One day Mr. Avery announced that he had the toothache, and if he were not so driven he would go and see Armstrong; he meant to give Armstrong all his work after this; Armstrong was a good fellow, and they often met Saturdays at the club. But the great Electric case was up just then, and necessary dentistry was an impossible luxury to the young lawyer. Endurance was a novelty, and Avery grew nervous under it. He bore pain neither better nor worse than most men; and he was really suffering. Any wife but Jean would have called him cross. Jean called him her poor boy. She dragged herself from her lounge—she had been a little less well the last few days—and lavished herself, as women like Jean do, pouring out her own tenderness—a rare wine. After all, there are not too many tender women; Jean was a genius in sympathy. She spent more sweetness and strength on that toothache than the other kind of woman has to give her husband if he meets a mortal hurt. Avery received this calmly. He was used to it. To do him justice, he did not know how cross he was. He was used to that, too. And so was she. The baby was ailing, besides, and things went hard. The sick woman's breath began to shorten again; and the coy color which had been so hard to win to her lips fled from them unobserved. The doctor was not called; Helen Thorne was out of town; and so it happened that no one noticed—for, as we say, Marshall Avery had the toothache.
One night he came home late, and as irritable as better men than he may be, and be forgiven for it, for the sake of that species of modern toothache in which your dentist neither extracts nor relieves, but devotes his highly developed and unhappy ingenuity to the demonic process which is known as "saving a tooth."
"He calls it killing a nerve," sputtered Avery. "I should call it killing a patient. This performance is the Mauser bullet of up-to-date dentistry. It explodes all over you— Oh, do let me alone, Jean! You can't do anything for me. A man does n't want to be bothered. Go and lie down, and look after yourself. Where is that hot water? I asked for alcohol—laudanum—some confounded thing. Can't anybody in this house do anything for me? I don't trouble them very often."
"It's Molly's evening out," said Mrs. Avery patiently. "I 'll get everything as fast as I can, dear." She was up and down stairs a good deal; she did not notice, herself, how often. And when she got to bed at last, she cried—she could not help it. It was something he had said. Oh, no matter what! But she did not know how to bear it, for she was so exhausted, and sobs, which were her mortal enemy, overcame her as soon as she was alone.
He did not hear her, for the door was shut between their rooms, and he was quite occupied with his Mauser bullet. He had fallen into the habit of shutting the door when the second baby was born; he maintained that the boy was worse than Pink. Pink cried like a lady, but the boy bellowed like a megatherium.
A little before half-past ten she heard him get up and dress and stir about. He opened the door, and said, without coming in:—