We were rolling luxuriously down Fifth Avenue when Betty rallied sufficiently from the torpor of digestion to murmur.
“To-morrow morning, after breakfast, I’ll walk three times round the reservoir.”
Roger came at eight. It was the first cold night of the season and the furnace was not broken in. In spite of lamps the room was chilly. It was good to see him again—in my parlor, in my Morris chair. He isn’t handsome, a long thin man, with a long thin face, smooth shaven and lined, and thick, sleek, iron-gray hair. Some one has said all that a man should have in the way of beauty is good teeth. Roger has that necessary asset and another one, well-shaped, gentlemanly hands, very supple and a trifle dry to the touch. And, yes, he has a charming smile.
He is forty-two and hasn’t changed a particle in the last fifteen years. Why can’t a woman manage that? When I was dressing to-night I looked in the glass and tried to reconstruct my face as it was fifteen years ago. I promised to be a pretty girl then, but it was just the fleeting beauty that nature gives us in our mating time, lends us for her own purposes. Now I see a pale mild person with flat-lying brown hair and that beaten expression peculiar to females whom life conquers. I don’t know whether it’s the mouth or the eyes, but I see it often in faces I pass on the street.
It was a funny evening—conversation varied by chamber music. We began it sitting in the middle of the room on either side of the table like the family lawyer and the heroine in the opening scene of a play. Then, as the temperature dropped, we slowly gravitated toward the register, till we finally brought up against it. A faint warm breath came through the iron grill and we leaned forward and basked in it. We were talking about women. We often do, it’s one of our subjects. Of course Roger is of the old school. He’s got an early Victorian point of view; I know he would value me more highly if I swooned now and then. He doesn’t call women “the weaker vessel,” but he thinks of them that way.
“I don’t see why you can’t be content with things as they are,” he said, spreading his hands to the register’s meager warmth. “Why should you want to go into politics and have professions? Why aren’t you willing to leave all that to us and stay where you belong?”
“But we may not have anything to do where we belong. Roger, if you move nearer the corner you’ll get a little more heat.”
Roger moved.
“Every woman has work in her own sphere,” he said, while moving.
“I haven’t.”