Virginia

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

"I—I am so sorry," she stammered; and because even in the agony of this moment she could not think long of herself, she added almost humbly, "Would you rather that I should go back again?" Then, by the haggard look of his face as he turned away from her towards the window, she saw that he, also, was suffering, and her soul yearned over him as it had yearned over Harry when he had had the toothache. "Oh, Oliver!" she cried, and again, "Oh, Oliver, won't you let me help you?"

But he was in the mood of despairing humiliation when one may support abuse better than pity. His failure, he knew, had been undeserved, and he was still smarting from the injustice of it as from the blows of a whip. For twenty-four hours his nerves had been on the rack, and his one desire had been to hide himself in the spiritual nakedness to which he was stripped. Had he been obliged to choose a witness to his suffering, it is probable that he would have selected a stranger from the street rather than his wife. The one thing that could have helped him, an intelligent justification of his work, she was powerless to give. In his need she had nothing except love to offer; and love, she felt instinctively, was not the balm for his wound.

Afraid and yet passionately longing to meet his eyes, she let her gaze fall away from him and wander timidly, as if uncertain where to rest, about the disordered room, with its dull red walls, its cheap Nottingham lace curtains tied back with cords, its elaborately carved walnut furniture, and its litter of days old newspapers upon the bed. She saw his neckties hanging in an uneven row over the oblong mirror, and she controlled a nervous impulse to straighten them out and put them away.

"Why didn't you telegraph me?" he asked, after a pause in which she had struggled vainly to look as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he should receive her in this way. "If I had known you were coming, I should have met you."

"Father wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she answered. "I—I thought you were sick."

In spite of his despair, it is probable that at the moment she was suffering more than he was—since a wound to love strikes deeper, after all, than a wound to ambition. Where she had expected to find her husband, she felt vaguely that she had encountered a stranger, and she was overwhelmed by that sense of irremediable loss which follows the discovery of terrible and unfamiliar qualities in those whom we have known and loved intimately for years. The fact that he was plainly struggling to disguise his annoyance, that he was trying as hard as she to assume a manner he did not feel, only added a sardonic humour to poignant tragedy.

"Have you had anything to eat?" he asked abruptly, and remembering that he had not kissed her when she entered, he put his arm about her and brushed her cheek with his lips.

"No, I waited to breakfast with you. I was in such a hurry to get here."

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and going over to the bell, he touched it with the manner of a man who is delighted that anything so perfectly practical as food exists in the world.

While he was speaking to the waiter, she took off her hat, and washed the stains of smoke and tears from her face. Her hair was a sight, she thought, but while she gazed back at her stricken eyes in the little mirror over the washstand, she recalled with a throb of gratitude that the stranger on the boat had said she was pretty. She felt so humble that she clung almost with desperation to the thought that Oliver always liked to have people admire her.