“What’s the way it is?” asked Corinne, sitting up on her heels and feeling over her person for a pin to fasten the waistband of the skirt.
“The way it is now with me and Viola—coldness, indifference, maybe dislike.” Then, half to himself: “There’s no understanding women. What were they made for, anyway?”
Corinne seemed to think this remark worthy of attention. Her search for the pin was arrested and she pondered for a moment. Then she looked at the colonel and said tentatively, not quite sure of the reasonableness of her reply:
“I suppose so that people can have mothers, colonel.”
“So that people can have love, Corinne,” he answered sadly.
Corinne, feeling that her solution of the problem had not been the right one, returned to the pin. She found it, and bending over the patient kitten, inserted it carefully into the band. But her calculations were not true, the pin pricked, and the cat, with an angry mew, broke away and went scuttling across the room inclosed in the skirt. Her appearance was so funny that Corinne sat back on her heels and, punching the colonel’s knee, cried in a burst of laughter:
“Oh, look, colonel, look! Ain’t she cunning?”
The colonel looked. The cat turned, still in the skirt, and eyed them both with a look of hurt protest. It appealed to the colonel’s humor as it had to Corinne’s. Their combined laughter filled the room and greeted Viola as she came up the passage from one of her long walks.
“What are you laughing at?” she asked, as she opened the door and entered like a pale vision wilted with the heat and light outside.
The colonel’s laughter died away immediately. Her listless air of delicacy struck him anew with the silent reproach which her mere presence now seemed to suggest. All amusement faded from his face, and he looked guiltily conscious, like a child found in mischief.