Her husband vouching her no reply, she slipped an arm about his neck, and, leaning over, drew his fork to her mouth and tasted the morsel thereon.
Then she turned her head sideways to regard him. “Don’t frown it back, Alec, the smile I mean. I adore you when you don’t want to and have to let it come. Acknowledge now, this is the way to breakfast.”
And Harriet, who had been led to regard playfulness as little less than vice, was conscious of Molly trying to force a ripe fig between Alexander’s lips, repressed, thin lips upon which softening sat as if afraid of itself and her.
“You see,” Molly was explaining, “I couldn’t get down sooner. P’tite was making the most absurd catches at her mosquito bar, and Celeste refusing to laugh at her. You haven’t finished your breakfast? Why must you always hurry off? No”—her hand against his mouth, he, risen now, she on a knee in her chair, clinging to him—“don’t tell me any more about Sumter having been fired upon, and your being worried over business. I hate business. What’s anything this moment, if you would only see it, compared with me, and ripe figs dipped in cream?”
And then the triumph of her laugh as, his arms suddenly around her, he grasped her, lifted, enfolded her for a moment, then as fiercely put her from him and went out, leaving Harriet sick, shaken, at this sight of human passion seen for the first time.
The following day Harriet’s father returned and she went home.
When she next saw her brother it was in Louisville, where he was driven back to his own people by reason of his Northern creed and sympathies. His father-in-law had been among the first to fall in defence of the Confederacy, and with Alexander, now, was his mother-in-law, widowed and dependent, and a wife in this sense changed from child to woman—that she was a fiercely avowed Southerner to the fibre of her.
With his little family he remained in Louisville a year. If his own people wondered at the extravagance of his wife and mother-in-law at a time when incomes were so seriously shrunken, Alexander was too much a Blair for even a Blair to approach the subject.
The child was sent daily to his mother’s—he saw to that—a pretty baby, the little Mary Alexina, and robed like a young princess; but beyond this he seemed to discourage intimacy between the households. Certainly there was no common ground, the business judgment, large experience, and the integrity of the Blairs being in the constant service of the government, while rumor had it that the home of young Mrs. Alexander Blair was the social rallying place for Southern sympathizers generally.
Suddenly, in the midst of big affairs, Alexander arranged otherwise for the maintenance of his wife’s mother, whom it was his to support for the few remaining years of her life, and went to Europe with Molly and the child. Long after it came to Harriet’s hearing that the frequent presence of a young Confederate officer at his house had led to the step.