"But whom are you going with?" he enquired, filled for the first time with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie moved.
She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green. "Oh, you wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the repeated question. What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he slowly sipped his coffee. Even if she should go with Brady alone, where was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission. He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought. Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the moment from his thoughts. But the very secretiveness of her manner—the suggestion of a hidden motive which dwelt in her nervous movements and even quivered in the little scintillating aigrette on her blonde head—aroused in him if not a positive distrust, still a bewildering and decidedly unpleasant confusion of ideas. He felt, somehow, vaguely impelled to action, yet for the life of him, he admitted after a moment, he could see no single direction in which action with regard to his wife would not savor of the indiscreet, if not of the ridiculous. The attitude of an aggrieved husband had always showed to him as something laughable, and an explosion of jealousy had never appeared more vulgar than it did while he sat patiently conjecturing if such a domestic cyclone might be counted upon to shake Connie to her senses. In the end he gave it up as a farce which he felt it would be beyond the power of his gravity to sustain. "I'll do anything in reason, heaven knows," he found himself confessing, after the instant's reflection, "but I'll be hanged before I'll set out in cold blood to play the fool."
The front door, closing with a bang, brought him instantly to his feet and, glancing through the window, he saw Connie about to step into a cab which she had signalled from the sidewalk. Her velvet gown trailed behind her, and she appeared perfectly unconcerned by the fact that she had sunk above her ankles in the heavy snowdrifts. A moment later, when she lifted her train to enter the cab, he discovered to his amazement that she was wearing low kid shoes with the thinnest of silk stockings. Then, before he could raise the window for a protest, the cab rolled off in the direction of Fifth Avenue, and, wet feet and twinkling feather, she was out of sight.
By the time he had got into his overcoat and followed her into the street, the snow had begun to fall more rapidly in large powdery flakes, which soon covered him in a thick, frosty coating from head to foot. As he walked briskly toward his office, he noticed with a quickened attention the women who like Connie, with nervous faces showing above elaborate gowns, were borne swiftly past him in hired cabs. Something, he hardly knew what, had opened his eyes to that glittering life of the world of which he had always been profoundly ignorant, and it seemed to him suddenly that the distance between himself and his wife had broadened to an impassable space in a single night. Connie was no longer the girl whom he remembered under cherry-coloured ribbons. She came in reality no closer to him than did the tired, restless women, with artificially brightened faces, who appeared to his exhausted eyes to whirl past him perpetually in cabs. A passionate regret seized him for the thing which Connie was not and could never be again—for the love he had never known and for the fatherhood that had been denied him.
He had turned, still plunged in his thoughts, into a quiet cross street where a crowd of ragged urchins were snowballing one another in a noisy battle; and as he paused for an instant to watch the fight he noticed that a man, coming from the opposite direction, had stopped also and stood now motionless with interest upon the sidewalk. The peculiar concentration of attention was the first thing which Adams remarked in the stranger—from his absorbed level gaze it was evident that mentally at least he had thrown himself for the moment into the thickest of the battle, and there was a flush of eager enjoyment in the face which was partially obscured by the falling snow flakes. Then, quick as a flash of light, something pleasantly familiar in the watching figure, gripped Adams with the memory of a college battle more than fifteen years ago, and he burst out in an exclamation of pleased surprise.
"You're Arnold Kemper and I'm Roger Adams," he said, laying his hand upon the other's arm.
Kemper wheeled about immediately, while the smile of placid amusement in his face broadened into a laugh of delighted recognition.
"Well, by Jove, it's great!" he responded, and the heartiness of his handshake sent a tingling sensation through Adams' arm. "I don't know when I've been so pleased for years. Been to luncheon?"
"I've just had it," laughed Adams, remembering that fifteen years ago, when he last saw him, Kemper had extended a similar invitation with the same grasp of hearty good fellowship. Was it possible that the man had really kept his college memories alive? he wondered in a daze of admiration, or had he himself merely awakened by his reappearance a train of associations which had lain undisturbed since their last parting. Let it be as it might, Adams felt that the encounter was of the pleasantest.
"I'm driven like a slave back to office drudgery," he added, "and I'm half inclined to envy you your freedom and your automobiles."