Julia made a pathetic grimace. "You've laughed at me so, Laurie. I realize all that was absurd—terribly futile."
"Did I? I thought I agreed with you that it was a fine thing to inoculate the struggling masses with the culture bug." He could not control his sarcasms, though he uttered them lightly. He wanted her to be as tired as he was—to rest with him. There was sweat on his wrists as he took his pipe from his pocket and pushed some tobacco into the dry charred bowl. When he laughed at her the pupils of his gray eyes were small and sharp and defensive, as though they had been pricked by his pain. Beautiful, he thought. She doesn't need me.
"I have a very middle-aged feeling about the welfare of humanity."
She came over and knelt by his side. "Am I too ridiculous? Can't you take me seriously, Laurie?" She wondered why it was that when he looked at her she always found suffering in his face. He held himself away from what she wanted to give. She wanted an abandon in which she would be glorified. She imagined eyes finding her wonderful. She smiled at him, her sweet humorless smile.
Laurence stroked her hair. "I take you too seriously," he said. "I sometimes feel that a husband is a very casual affair to you modern women."
She was tender to his ignorance of her and vain of her secret terror of herself. Watching him, she thought of the day when his youngest child died and he had allowed her to see his suffering. Because she had never wished to hurt him she resented it that he had never again been helpless before her. She wondered if he had been strong like this to his other wife, or if he gave more of his suffering to the dead than to the living. Suffering filled Julia with tenderness, so she could not think herself cruel. "Dear!" She kissed him gently, maternally, and climbed to her feet.
He saw her reproachful eyes. Youth, so free with itself. Rapacious for emotion. He felt bitterly his necessity more final than hers. "Where's my last Journal of American Science?" He dismissed her intensity. Lifting his thick brows, he took out spectacles and put them on. He watched her over the rims.
She handed him his paper. He was a child to her. Her secret sense of sin made her strong and superior. She wanted to be gentle. She did not know why the sense of wrongdoing made her so confident of herself. While he read the journal she seated herself on the opposite side of the fireplace with her embroidery. When he lowered the paper for an instant and she had a glimpse of his oldish oblivious face, she loved its unawareness and tears came to her eyes again.
On Saturday morning Julia attended the meeting of a club in which the problems of business women were reviewed. The members gathered in a hotel auditorium where musicales were sometimes given. The long windows of the room opened above an alleyway and its gold rococo gloom was relieved of the obscure sunshine by electric lights. The women sat in little groups here and there, only half filling the place, and the murmur of voices went on indistinguishably until the president, Mrs. Hurst, a pale self-confident little woman with a whimsical smile, stepped to the platform, below the garlanded reliefs of Beethoven and Mozart, and struck her gavel on the desk. Then an unfinished silence crept over the scattered assemblage. A stout intellectual-looking Jewess came forward ponderously, adjusted her nose glasses, and read the minutes of the previous meeting, while those before her listened with forced attention, or frankly considered the interesting design of green and black embroidery which ornamented her dark blue dress.