CHAPTER XX
If Alice or her husband apprehended a stormy sequel to the unpleasant scene in her dressing room both were relieved that none followed. Not a word came up between them as a result of the breach. There was the usual silence that follows a tempestuous outbreak and the usual indirect, almost accidental, resumption of speaking relations after the acute suspicion of renewed hostilities had worn itself out.
MacBirney had the best of reasons for ignoring what had passed. He had, in fact, experienced the most surprising moments of his life and caution advised against the stirring up of any further altercation. Heretofore he had always known just what his wife, when bullied, would do; but he no longer knew and the uncertainty gave him pause.
He found matter for surprise, indeed for a series of surprises, in the manner in which Alice stood newly revealed to him. Dependence and timidity seemed suddenly to have left her. She walked a new path; not one of complete indifference to her husband, but of decision complete in itself. Forced to cast aside his judgment and fall back on her own, Alice accepted the alternative openly. Her new attitude made itself felt in unnumbered ways--sometimes in no more than arranging for a day down-town with Fritzie, sometimes in discussing when Cedar Lodge should be opened and how. MacBirney found himself no longer consulted; Alice told him what she intended to do. If he gave arbitrary or unreasonable orders they were ignored. If he followed the subject further his inquiries were ignored.
Alice realized it was not right to live in a home in this way, but MacBirney himself had taught her so many ways of wrong living that compunction had grown dull. His pupil, long unwilling to accept his debasing standards of married life, long suffering the cruelty of finding them enforced upon her, had at last become all that he had made her and something unpleasantly more--she made herself now complete mistress of her own affairs.
Nor was Alice less surprised at the abject surrender of her husband. She knew him in the end better than he knew himself, and cowardly though he was, she felt the new situation would not endure forever--that worse must surely follow. But those who learn to sleep on dumb reproach and still for years the cry of waking apprehension, learn also not to look with foreboding ahead.
There were, it is true, times in which Alice asked herself if in her new attitude she were not walking in a dream; slumbers in which the old shrinking fear returned; moments in which she could hardly realize her own determination. But the fear that had so long subdued her now served to support her courage. Go back she would not; the present she had made her own, the future must account for itself.
Moreover, as the acuteness of the crisis passed everything looked better. The present tends always to justify itself. And prosperous skies opening on MacBirney's speculative ventures consoled him for such loss of prestige as he suffered in his own home.
He was again, curiously enough, Alice thought, in cordial touch with Robert Kimberly. She never asked a question and did not know for a long time what could account for this change, since he had been abusing Kimberly vigorously during the life of the market pool. Kimberly had never called at the town apartment and Alice heard of him only through Fritzie, who visited The Towers on monetary errands and always spoke interestingly of Robert's affairs.
And now spring airs came even to town, and Alice, breathing them, with the sudden sunshine and the morning song of birds, longed for her country home. She kept the telephone wire busy summoning her gardener to conferences and laid out elaborate plans with him for making Cedar Lodge more beautiful for the summer. A number of things conspired to keep her from getting out to Second Lake early. But the servants had been installed and the lodge put in readiness for her coming.