“Then I had married,” he said quietly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she assented, trying to impart a suggestion of sudden innocent remembrance to her tone. “You had married. Why, of course.”
He vouchsafed no reply. She was distressed and mortified, her face red with anger at her own stupidity. In her embarrassment she looked down, smoothing her lace cuffs, and waiting for him to say something as he had done before. But this time he made no attempt to resume the conversation. Stealing a sidelong glance at him she saw that he had turned to the window and was gazing out. There was an expression of brooding gloom on his profile, his eyebrows drawn low, his lips close set. She judged rightly that he did not intend to speak again, and she took up her book and opened it.
Half an hour later, rising to give him his medicine, she saw that he had fallen asleep. She was at his side before she discovered it, thinking his eyes were drooped in thought. Standing with the glass in her hand she looked at him with something of a child’s shrinking curiosity and a woman’s pity for a strong creature weakened and brought low. The light in the room was growing gray and in it she saw his face, with the shadows in its hollows, looking thin and haggard in the abandonment of sleep. For the first time, seeing him clothed and upright, she realized that he was a personable man, a splendid man, and also for the first time she thought of him outside this room and this house, and a sort of proud resentment stirred in her at the memory of the marriage he had made—the marriage with the woman who was not good.
An hour later when the doctor came back she was kneeling on the floor by the open stove door, softly building up the fire. From the orifice—a circle of brilliance in the dim room—a red glow painted her serious, down-bent face with a hectic color, and touched with a bright, palpitating glaze the curves of her figure. At the sound of the opening door she looked up quickly, and, her hands being occupied, gave a silencing jerk of her head toward the sleeping man.
The doctor looked at them both. The scene was like a picture of some primitive domestic interior where youth and beauty had made a nest, warmed by that symbol of life, a fire, which one replenished while the other slept.
CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH BERNY WRITES A LETTER
The morning after the quarrel Bernice woke late. She had not fallen asleep till the night was well spent, the heated seething of her rage keeping the peace of repose far from her. It was only as the dawn paled the square of the window that she fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed by dreams full of stress and strife.
She looked up at the clock; it was nearly ten. Dominick would have left for the bank before this, so the wretched constraint of a meeting with him was postponed. Sallow and heavy-eyed, her head aching, oppressed by a sense of the unbearable unpleasantness of the situation, she threw on her wrapper, and going to the window drew the curtain and looked out.
The bedroom had but one window, wedged into an angle of wall, and affording a glimpse of the green lawn and clipped rose trees of the house next door. There was a fog this morning and even this curtailed prospect was obliterated. She stood yawning drearily, and gazing out with eyes to which her yawns had brought tears. Her hair made a wild bush round her head, her face looked pinched and old. She was one of those women whose good looks are dependent on animation and millinery. In this fixity of inward thought, unobserved in unbecoming disarray, one could realize that she had attained the thirty-four years she could so successfully deny under the rejuvenating influences of full dress and high spirits.