Sometimes as she talked to him she would meet his eyes fixed on her with a deep, vacant glance, which she suddenly realized was unseeing and unheeding. In the evening as he sat reading in the cramped confines of the den she surreptitiously watched him and saw that a moment often came when he dropped his book, and with his long body limp in the arm-chair, his chin sunk on his breast, would sit with a brooding gaze fixed on nothing. Once, as he was dreaming this way, she said suddenly,
“What are you thinking of, Dominick? Antelope?”
He started and turned upon her a face that had reddened consciously.
“Why should I think of Antelope?” he said, and she was aware that her remark had startled him and made him uncomfortable.
“For no particular reason,” she answered lightly; “you just looked as if you were thinking of something a long way off.”
She tried to reassure herself that it all rose from the quarrel. To believe that comforted her and gave her confidence, but it was hard to think it, for not only did her own instinct proclaim against it, but Dominick’s manner and attitude were in distinct refutation of any such theory. He was not sullen, he was absent; he was not resentful, he was indifferent. And in small outward ways he tried to please her, which was not after the manner of a sore and angry man. On this very Sunday he had agreed to meet her and her family in the park at the band stand at four. She always dined with her sisters on Sunday and if the weather was fine they went to the park and listened to the music. It was nearly a year now since Dominick had joined these family parties, preferring to walk on the Presidio hills and the Cliff House beach with a friend from the bank. But on the evening before he had promised to meet them; been quite agreeable about it, Berny had thought, when her pleadings and importunities had finally extorted from him a promise to join them there.
She left the dining-room and walked up the hallway to the parlor, her head drooped, anxieties gnawing at her. The little room was flooded with sunshine, and she parted the lace curtains and, throwing up the window, leaned out. The rich, enveloping warmth surrounded her, clasped her, seemed to sink deep into her and thaw the apprehensions that were so cold at her heart. She drew in the sweet, still air, that did not stimulate but that had in it something of a crystalline youth and freshness, like the air of an untainted world, concerned with nothing but the joy of living. The scents of flowers were in it; the mellowness of the earth and its fruits. Peace was the message of this tranquil Sunday morning, peace was in the sunshine, in the sound of bells with which the air was full, in the fall of feet—light, joyous feet—on the pavement, in the voices of passers-by and the laughter, sweet and broken, of children. It was not right for any one to harbor cankering cares on such a day. The earth was happy, abandoned to the sunshine, irresponsible, care free, rejoicing in the perfect moment. The woman felt the restoring processes that Nature, in its tireless generosity, offers to all who will take them. She felt eased of her troubles, soothed and cheered, as though the enwrapping radiance that bathed her held an opiate for jangled nerves. Blinking in the brightness she leaned on the window-sill, immovable, quieted, feeling the warmth suffuse her and dissipate those alarms that half an hour earlier had been so chill and heavy.
As she dressed, the sense of well-being and confidence increased. She looked very well this morning. Since Dominick’s return she had looked haggard and thin. Sometimes she had seemed to see, showing shadowy through her reflected face in the mirror, the lines and hollows of that face when time should have put a stamp on it that neither massage nor pigments would efface. A sudden moment of revelation showed her herself as an old woman, her nose pointed, her mouth a thin, tight line. This morning the glass gave her back none of these disconcerting hints. She was at her best, and as she dressed carefully and slowly, she had the satisfaction of seeing that each added article of apparel increased her good looks. When she finally put on her new hat—the one she had bought in celebration of Dominick’s return—and over it tied a white and black dotted veil, she was so gratified with the picture she presented that she was reluctant to leave it and pirouetted slowly before the glass, surveying her back and side views, and finally lifting her skirt that she might see the full effect of her lilac petticoat as it burst into sight in an ebullition of pleats and frills.
Walking up the avenue she was bridlingly conscious that her brilliant appearance drew its tribute of glances. Many people looked at her, and their sidelong admiration was an even more exhilarating tonic than the sunshine. She walked with a light, elastic step, spreading perfume on the air, her progress accompanied by a rich, seductive rustle. Once or twice she passed members of that exclusive world from which she had stolen Dominick. She swept by them, languidly indifferent, her eyes looking with glacial hauteur over their heads. The sound made by her brushing silk petticoats was gratifyingly aggressive. She imparted to them a slight disdainful swing, and lifted her dress skirt daintily higher, conscious of the impeccable amplitude of her emerging lilac frills.
The habit of dining with her own people on Sunday had been one she had never abandoned, even in the first aspiring days of her marriage. It was a sort of family reunion and at first Dominick had been a not unwilling participant in its domestic festivities. The solid bourgeois respectability of his wife’s relations appealed to him. For all his advantages in money and education he was of the same class himself, and while Berny was, if not a beloved spouse, a yet endurable one, he had found the Sunday gatherings and subsequent hejira to the park not entirely objectionable. For over a year now he had escaped from it, pleading the need of open air and exercise, and his sisters-in-law, who had at first protested, had grown used to his absence and accepted it as something to bear uncomplainingly.