"Don't let me forget to answer that, Wilkins," he said, in an annoyed tone; "the response must be sent this afternoon, too, without fail."
"I don't think you wrote the notes you spoke of yesterday, sir," observed Wilkins, with an English accent and a manner of respectful intimacy.
"Hang it all! I don't believe I did," returned Kemper, as he drew his chair up to the table and tapped his egg shell. "That comes of letting a thing you hate to do go over. I say, Wilkins, if I attempt to leave this room before I've answered those letters, you're to restrain me by force, do you hear?"
"Yes, sir; certainly, sir," replied Wilkins, as he went out to bring in the toast.
Kemper laid his napkin across his knees, leaned comfortably back in his chair, and unfolded one of the morning papers beside his plate. As he did so he expanded his lungs with a deep breath, while his glance travelled rapidly to the column which contained the day's reports of the stock market. He knew already that the Chericoke Valley Central in which he had invested had jumped thirty points and was still advancing, but he read the printed statements with the exhaustless interest with which a lover might return to a love letter he had already learned by heart. His faith in the Chericoke Valley Central stock was strong, and he meant to keep a close grip on it for some time to come.
Turning a fresh page presently, his eyes wandered leisurely over the staring headlines, and came suddenly to a halt before a trivial item inserted among the Western news. It was a brief notice of his divorced wife's marriage, and to his amazement the announcement caused him an annoyance that was almost like the ghost of a retrospective jealousy. It was quite evident to him that he did not want her for himself, yet he suffered a positive displeasure at the thought that she should now belong to another man. After the ten years since they had separated was she still so "awfully splendid?" he wondered, had she kept her figure, which was long, athletic, with a military carriage, and did she still wear her hair in the fashion of a German omelette? "Thank heaven I'm well out of it at any rate," he commented with feeling. "That comes of a man's marrying before he's twenty-five. He's turned cynic before he gets to forty"; and marriage appeared to him in his thoughts as a detestable and utterly boring institution, which interfered continually with a man's freedom and exacted from him a perpetual sociability. The most blissful sensation he had ever known, he told himself, was that of his recovered liberty; then his sincerity of nature compelled him to an honest contradiction—he had known one emotion more blissful still and that was the madness which had prompted him to his unfortunate marriage.
Oh, he had been very much in love without a doubt! and while he sat peacefully drinking his two cups of coffee, eating his two eggs and his four pieces of toast with orange marmalade, he remembered, with a melancholy which in no wise affected his appetite, the first occasion upon which he had kissed the woman who had been his wife. The memory of her tall, erect figure, with its dashing military carriage, aroused in him an agreeable and purely physical regret—the kind of regret which is strong enough only to sweeten the knowledge of past pleasures; and he admitted with his accustomed frankness that if he had never kissed her again he should probably have continued to regard her with a charming, if impractical, sentiment. But marriage had brushed off the bloom of that early romance; and as he recognised this, he felt a keen resentment against nature which had cheated him into believing that the illusion of love would not vanish at the first touch of reality.
He had lived upon the surface of things and the surface had contented if it had not satisfied him. It had never entered his thoughts to question if he had had from life the best that it could offer, but he had sometimes wondered, in moments of nervous exasperation against small events, why it was that there could be no end under the sun to a man's pursuit of the fugitive sensation. When he looked back now over the breathless years of his life, he saw, almost with indignation, that whatever punishment fate had held in reserve for him, the avenger had inevitably appeared in the form his own gratified desire. He had withheld his hand from nothing; the thing that he had wanted he had taken without question—impulse and possession had flowed for him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me happiness—and this—and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions—and he felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life, that he had been deluded into a childish yet irretrievable error.
As he sat there over his paper, he remembered his impatient early love, his ecstatic marriage, and then the long years during which he had lived, as he put it to himself, in a "mortal funk" of the divorce court. Not moral obligation, but social cowardice, he admitted, had held him in a bondage from which his wife had at last liberated him by a single blow. Well, it was all over! he heaved a sigh of relief, emptied his coffee cup, and dismissed the subject, with its oppressive train of associations, from his mind.
But his temperamental blitheness had suffered in the chill of recollection, and he frowned down upon the staring headlines which ornamented the open page before him. His face, which recorded unerringly the slightest emotional change through which he passed, grew suddenly heavy and was over clouded by a momentary fit of gloom. He had not seen, had hardly thought of his former wife, once in the ten years since their separation, yet he found almost to his annoyance that the mere printed letters of her name reinvoked her image from the darkness in which his sentimental skeletons were laid. Two brief lines in a newspaper sufficed to produce her as an important factor in his present life.