"Of course you do. I never saw you when you didn't."
"I feel so dreadfully untidy. I never tried to dress in a sleeping-car before."
"It did rock, didn't it?"
"I'll never travel again at night if I can help it. There's a cinder in your eye; let me get it out for you." It thrilled her pleasantly to remove the cinder with the corner of her handkerchief, and to order him to sit still whenever the cab jolted. It was incredibly young, incredibly foolish, but it was all a part of the wonderful enchantment in which she moved. The cinder had made an agreeable episode, but when it had been removed there was nothing more for them to talk about. In four weeks of daily and hourly companionship they had said very easily, Gabriella had found, everything they had longed so passionately to say to each other. It was strange—it was positively astounding how soon they had talked themselves empty of ideas and fallen back upon repetition and ejaculation. Before her marriage she had thought that a lifetime would be too short to hold the full richness of their confidences; and yet now, after a month, though they still made love, they had ceased, almost with relief, to make conversation.
After turning into Fifth Avenue they drove for ages between depressing examples in brownstone of an architecture which, like George, was trying rather vaguely to express nothing; and then rolling heavily into Fifty-seventh Street stopped presently before one of the solemn houses which stood, in the dignity of utter ugliness, midway of a long block. "They are all so alike I don't see how I shall ever know where I live," thought Gabriella. Then, as George helped her out of the cab, the door opened as if by magic, and beyond the solemn manservant she saw the short, stout figure of a lady in a tightly fitting morning gown of black silk. Hurrying up the steps, she was pressed against a large smooth bosom which yielded as little as if it had been upholstered in leather.
"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a charming voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella saw a handsome, slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a girl and a beautiful forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray hair which looked as hard and bright as silver.
"I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at the table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully early."
Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if she had never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off Gabriella's hat and coat, kissed her several times while she was doing so, and at last, still talking animatedly, led them into the dining-room.
"Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected delight, while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes, pale, aristocratic features, and skin that had a curious parchment-like texture, put down the Times, and came forward to meet them. Though he did not speak as he kissed her, Gabriella felt that there was sincere, if detached, friendliness in his little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost tenderly to her chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and supplied with rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and the butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella attributed first to something he had just read in the newspaper, she presently discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the world except Wall Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention were somewhere else; he spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law kindly, but as if he were not thinking about them; he treated his wife, whom he adored, as if he had not clearly perceived her. In the profound abstraction in which he lived every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law adored his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her as a person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his energies, his attention were elsewhere.
"Is that the way George will treat me—as if I were only a dream woman?" thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law over the open sheet of the Times. Then, with her eyes on her husband, she realized that he was of his mother's blood, not his father's. Business could never absorb him. His restlessness, his instability, his love of pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his nature by one supreme interest.