The Wheel of Life

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"By Jove, I've come to the place when to settle down and live quietly is the best thing I can do," he concluded, as he helped himself to marmalade. "I've reached the time of life when a man has to pull up and go easily or else break to pieces. It's all very well to take one's fling in youth, but middle age is the period for retrenchment."

Then, while he still congratulated himself upon the expediency of virtue, another image appeared in his reflections, and the paternal instinct, so strong in men of his kind, responded instantly to the argument which clothed his mere natural impulse. Marriage, he told himself, would mean a son of his own, and the stability which he had always missed in any relation with a woman would be secured through the responsibility which fatherhood involved. Here was the interest his life had lacked, after all—here was the explanation of that vacancy his emotions had not filled; and it appeared to him that his loves had failed in definiteness, in any vital purpose, because he had never seen himself fulfilled in the son which he now desired.

"I shouldn't wonder if this is what I've been wanting all the time," he thought; and the generous fervour, the ideal purity, he had never been able to introduce into his romances, gathered luminously about the cradle of his unborn child. It seemed to him, as he smoked his second cigar in the face of this paternal vision, that he had stumbled by accident upon the one secret of happiness which he had overlooked; and it was while the beaming effulgence of this mood still lasted, that he finished his papers, and determined to look in upon Laura on his way down town. The memory of last evening was placed at the distance of a thousand miles by his sudden change of humour, and it seemed as useless to reproach himself for an act so far beyond his present area of personality as it would have been to moralise upon an indiscretion in ancient history. A little later, as he ascended Laura's steps, he felt serenely assured that he had made the best possible disposition of his future.

To his surprise she was not in her sitting-room when he entered, and it was several minutes before she came in, very quietly and with an averted face. When he would have taken her in his arms, she drew back quickly with an indignant and wounded gesture. Her eyes were burning, but he had never heard her speak in so hard a voice.

"You were in town last night," she said, and by her look more than her words he was brought face to face with the suspicion that she was capable of a jealous outburst.

"I wanted to come, but I couldn't," he answered, with an attempt at his quizzical humour. "I rushed here as soon as I dared this morning—isn't that enough to prove something?"

Again he made a movement to take her in his arms, but her face was so unyielding that his hands, which he had outstretched, fell to his sides. From the look in her eyes he could almost believe that she had grown to hate him in the night; and at the thought his earlier impetuous emotion flamed in his heart.

"Don't lie to me," she said passionately, "there's nothing I hate so much as a lie."

"I never lied to you in my life," he answered, as he drew back with an expression of cold reproach—for it seemed to him that her attack had offered an unpardonable affront to his honour.

"When you did not come I sent a note to you—I feared something had happened—I hardly knew what—but something. The note came back. They told the messenger—" the words were wrenched out of her as by some act of bodily torture, and, at last, in spite of her struggle, she could go no further. Pausing she looked at him in silence, while her hand pressed into her bosom as if to keep down by physical force the passion which she could no longer control by a mental effort. The violence of temper which in a coarser—a more flesh-and-blood beauty—would have been repelling and almost vulgar, was in her chastened and ennobled by the ethereal quality in her outward form—and the emotion she expressed seemed to belong less to the ordinary human impulses than to some finer rage of spirit which was independent of the gesture or the utterance of flesh.