"How like you it was," she returned, almost in a whisper, with the spray of sweet alyssum held to her lips, "and how can I thank you?"
His slightly wooden features, flushed now with a fine colour, as if he had been riding in the March wind, softened until I hardly knew them. Standing there in his immaculate clothes, with his carefully groomed mustache hiding a trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, a George with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as an acquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked into being, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened in George, who had lost her, some quality—inscrutable and elusive—that she had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this quality was, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding, sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared to contain and possess them all. The mere fact of its existence, and that I recognised without explaining it, had the effect of a barrier which separated me for the moment from my wife and the man to whom she was related by the ties of race and of class. Again I was aware of that sense of strangeness, of remoteness, which I had felt on the night of our home-coming when I had stood, spellbound, before Bonny Page's exquisite grooming and the shining gloss on her hair and boots. Something—a trifle, perhaps, had passed between Sally and George—and the reason I did not understand it was because I belonged to another order and had inherited different perceptions from theirs. The trifle—whatever it was—appeared visibly, I knew, before us; it was evident and on the surface, and if I failed to discern it what did that prove except the shortness of the vision through which I looked? A physical soreness, like that of a new bruise, attacked my heart, and rising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out, leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat in the hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to her lips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by the tenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she was mine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keener comprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not of jealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curious eccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush of ambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in the things in which success was possible. If I could not give what George gave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better. When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, I had little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they had always done to the possession of power. Only let that power find its fullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as the living present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all, what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life, while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibre woven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust. Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way to triumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to the dazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound up with my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feeling from which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities of my position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passed through my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and kept me tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. For pleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or an absent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to think or to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar after dinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bare shoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in New York, and during my absence, it never occurred to me to enquire how she filled her long, empty days. She was sure of me, she trusted me, I knew; and in the future, I told myself when I had leisure to think of it—next year, perhaps—I should begin again to play the part of an ardent lover. She was as desirable—she was far dearer to me than she had ever been in her life, but while I held her safe and close in my clasp, my mind reached out with its indomitable energy after the uncertain, the unattained. I had my wife—what I wanted now was a fortune and a great name to lay at her feet.
And all these months did she ever question, ever ask herself, while she watched me struggling day after day with the lust for power, if the thing that I sought to give her would in the end turn to Dead Sea fruit at her lips? Question she may have done in her heart, but no hint of it ever reached me—no complaint of her marriage ever disturbed the outward serenity in which we lived. Yet, deep in myself, I heard always a still small voice, which told me that she demanded something far subtler and finer than I had given—something that belonged inherently to the nature of George Bolingbroke rather than to mine. Even now, though she loved me and not George, it was George who was always free, who was always amiable, who was always just ready and just waiting to be called. On another day, a month or two later, he came in again with his blossom of sweet alyssum, and again her eyes grew shining and grateful, while the old bruise throbbed quickly to life in my heart.
"Is it all right still?" she asked, and he answered, "All right," with his rare smile, which lent a singular charm to his softened features.
Then he glanced across at me and made, I realised, an effort to be friendly.
"You ought to get a horse, Ben," he remarked, "it would keep you from getting glum. If you'd hunted with us yesterday, you would have seen Bonny Page take a gate like a bird."
"I tried to follow," said Sally, "but Prince Charlie refused."
"You mean I wouldn't let go your bridle," returned George, in a half-playful, half-serious tone.
The bruise throbbed again. Here, also, I was shut out—I who had carried potatoes to George's door while he was off learning to follow the hounds. His immaculate, yet careless, dress; the perfection of his manner, which seemed to make him a part of the surroundings in which he stood; the very smoothness and slenderness of the hand that rested on Sally's chair—all these produced in me a curious and unreasonable sensation of anger.