It was her turn to nod. She thought it best to say nothing, and waited. But his eyes bent inquiringly upon her, and the waiting silence seemed to demand a comment. She made the first one that occurred to her:
“Whom were you with?”
“My wife,” said the young man.
Rose felt that an indefinite silence would have been better than this. All she knew of Dominick Ryan’s wife was that she was a person who had not been respectable and whose union with Dominick had estranged him from his people. Certainly, whatever else she was, young Mrs. Ryan was not calculated to be an agreeable subject of converse with the man who in marrying her had sacrificed wealth, family, and friends. The doctor’s chief injunction to Rose had been to keep the invalid in a state of tranquillity. Oppressed by a heavy sense of failure she felt that nursing was not her forte.
She murmured a vague sentence of comment and this time determined not to speak, no matter how embarrassing the pause became. She even thought of taking up her book and was about to stretch her hand for it, when he said,
“But it seems so queer when our parents have been friends for years, and I know Gene, and you know my sister Cornelia so well.”
She drew her hand back and leaned forward, frowning and staring in front of her, as she sent her memory backward groping for data.
“Well, you see a sort of series of events prevented it. When we were little our parents lived in different places. Ages ago when we first came down from Virginia City you were living somewhere else, in Sacramento, wasn’t it? Then you were at school, and after that you went East to college for four years, and when you got back from college I was in Europe. And when I came back from Europe—that’s over two years ago now—why then——”
She had again brought up against his marriage, this time with a shock that was of a somewhat shattering nature.
“Why, then,” she repeated falteringly, realizing where she was—“why, then—let’s see—?”