They were talking together. To watch wasn’t enough—I had to hear and I stole forward, stepping lightly over the bathroom rug and half closed the door. Standing against it, I listened. Heaven knows the conversation was innocent enough. She was telling him about a bracelet she wore that belonged to some of those Spanish people she was descended from. I suddenly felt as if I was looking through a keyhole, and had stretched out my hand to shut the door when a silence fell. Then all the acquired decencies of race and breeding left me. I pushed the door open a crack and peered in. She had taken the bracelet off and given it to him and he was turning it about, studying it while she watched him.
“I’ve been told it’s quite valuable as an antique,” she said. “Do you suppose it really is?”
“I don’t know about the antique, but I should think it might have some value. The design’s very unusual,” he answered, and handed it back to her.
She clasped it on her arm, and as she did so, her head down-bent, they were silent, his eyes on her face.
I had never seen him look at any woman that way, but I had seen other men. It is an unmistakable look, the mute confession of that passion which makes the proudest man a slave.
I closed the door and leaned against it. For a moment I felt sick and frightened—frightened at what I’d seen and frightened of myself.
Presently I came into the room and found them still talking of the bracelet. And then Roger and I started for our walk, leaving Lizzie alone.
He suggested that we go round the reservoir and I agreed, stepping along silently beside him. It was a raw bleak afternoon, no sun, everything gray. The streets were sprinkled with sauntering Sunday people who had a detached dark aspect against the toneless monochrome. They looked as if they were moving in front of painted scenery. The park was wintry, sear boughs patterned against the sky, blurs of denuded bushes, expanses of hoary grass. Along the roadway the ruts were growing crumbly with the frost, and little spears and splinters of ice edged the puddles.
The reservoir shone a smooth steely lake, with broken groups of figures moving about it. Some of them walked briskly, others loitered, red and chilled. All kinds of people were making the circuit of that body of confined and conquered water—Jews and Gentiles, simple and gentle, couples of lovers, companies of young men, family parties with the children getting in the way and being shoved to one side, stiff stout women like Betty trying to lose a few pounds. On the west side vast apartment-houses made a rampart, pierced with windows like a line of forts.
We commented on the cold and Roger quickened the pace, sweeping me along the path’s outer edge. Presently he began to talk of Lizzie, leaning down to catch my answers, keen, impatient, straining to hear me and not lose a word. He is a tall man and I am a small woman and I bobbed along at his shoulder trying to keep up with him, trying to sound bright and interested, and feeling myself a meager unlovely body carrying a sick and shriveled heart.