It was one of those wooden structures on Sacramento Street not far from Van Ness Avenue where the well-to-do and socially-aspiring crowd themselves into a floor of seven rooms, and derive satisfaction from the proximity of their distinguished neighbors who refuse to know them. It contained four flats, each with a parlor bay-window and a front door, all four doors in neighborly juxtaposition at the top of a flight of six marble steps.
Dominick’s was the top flat; he had to ascend a long, carpeted stairway with a turn half-way up to get to it. Now, looking at the bay-window, he saw lights gleaming from below the drawn blinds. Berny was still up. A lingering hope that she might have gone to bed died, and his sense of reluctance gained in force and made him feel slightly sick. He was there, however, and he had to go up. Fitting his key into the lock he opened the hall door.
It was very quiet as he mounted the long stairs, but, as he drew near the top, he became aware of a windy, whistling noise and looking into the room near the stair-head saw that all the gas-jets were lit and turned on full cock, and that the gas, rushing out from the burner in a ragged banner of flame, made the sound. He was about to enter and lower it when he heard his wife’s voice coming from the open door of her room.
“Is that you, Dominick?” she called.
Her voice was steady and high. Though it was hard, with a sort of precise clearness of utterance, it was not conspicuously wrathful.
“Yes,” he answered, “it’s I,” and he forgot the gas-jets and walked up the hall. He did not notice that in the other rooms he passed the gas was turned on in the same manner. The whistling rush of its escape made a noise like an excited, unresting wind in the confined limits of the little flat.
The door of Berny’s room was open, and under a blaze of light from the chandelier and the side lights by the bureau she was sitting in a rocking-chair facing the foot of the bed. She held in her hand a walking-stick of Dominick’s and with this she had been making long scratches across the foot-board, which was of walnut and was seamed back and forth, like a rock scraped by the passage of a glacier. As Dominick entered, she desisted, ceased rocking, and turned to look at him. She had an air of taut, sprightly impudence, and was smiling a little.
“Well, Dominick,” she said jauntily, “you’re late.”
“Yes, I believe I am,” he answered. “I did not come straight back. I walked about for a while.”
He slowly crossed the room to the fireplace and stood there looking down. There were some silk draperies on the mantel matched by those which were festooned over the room’s single window. He fastened his eyes on the pattern stamped on the looped-up folds, and was silent. He thought Berny would realize from the fact that he had not come directly home that the invitation had been denied. This was his bungling, masculine way of breaking the news.