“The child isn’t spoiled a bit. I’ve been afraid she’d come home sophisticated and world-wise. She’s just an innocent girl, in spite of her long skirts.”
“Yes,” Sydney said, with a catch in his throat, “she’s as pure and fair as a May morning—and the fairest mornings are always the ones that follow the darkest nights. Father, couldn’t you trump up some excuse to bring her here to stay with us ... keep her away from her mother as much as possible?”
“Curious, Syd, but I was going to speak to you about that very thing. David came to me, when he knew Eileen was coming home and asked me—oh, it was tough for him to do it. He’s so damnably loyal! Don’t you think we could fit up the room next to Nanny’s, so that the child could sleep here, the nights when she’s going to have early classes at the college? It’s a shame to deprive David of even that much of her company. But we’ll make it up to him in ways his wife doesn’t suspect—if we can inject enough guile into him to enable him to play his part without fumbling. He feels that she must, must be kept away from her mother.”
“What is the trouble with David?” Syd asked abruptly. “You’ve doped him on tonics all summer, and he doesn’t improve in the least.”
“The climacteric—and his wife’s merciless tongue. David is approaching fifty. A man’s mental and physical being undergoes a subtle change in that year. It’s not so crucial as the grand climacteric—the transformation from manhood to age—that comes at sixty-three. You young doctors will be telling us that it is an exploded theory; but I have followed it for forty years. To a sensitive chap like David Trench, it’s serious. Just this year, when he ought to be coddled and petted, his wife seasons his food with gall and puts a dash of aqua fortis in his tea.
“I’ve ordered him to sleep in a room by himself, with the door locked, so that she couldn’t wake him up with her nagging and upbraiding. I told her, point-blank, that she was killing him—and she did what I might have expected.”
“Yes, she ‘slipped from under’ by writing Lary that she was being terribly set upon by his father, and it was his duty to come home. Father”—Syd’s blue eyes blazed—“why didn’t David take a riding whip to his wife the first time she—”
The man who could look beneath sex interrupted with an impatient gesture.
“David is a woman. More than that, Sydney, Mrs. Trench is a man—trapped in a woman’s body. When nature makes a blunder like that, there’s usually the devil to pay. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact—or I’d be in danger of poisoning Lavinia Trench.”