“Perhaps it will be on their cards.”
Then the Fosses talked of other things. But when Mrs. Foss, after dinner, went upstairs for her scarf,–it was too cool now to sit out of doors in the evening without a wrap,–she remembered the cards, and took them out of her husband’s pocket.
“Miss Estelle Madison,” she read. “Mrs. Aurora Hawthorne.” There was nothing else. She continued a little longer to look at the bits of pasteboard in her hand. “Well-sounding names, both of them–like names in a play. Mrs. Aurora. She’s a widow, then.” Mrs. Foss considered. “Or else divorced.”
Jerome Foss sat out in the garden on fine evenings with his cigar, and watched the serene oncoming of the night, because he loved to do this. His wife stayed with him to be company, when, without an old-fashioned ideal of married life, her natural bent would have urged her indoors, where the lamps were, to read or sew or even play patience. But she lingered contentedly and all seemed to her as it should be, with the two of them sitting near each other in their garden chairs before the family door-stone, he smoking, she getting the benefit of it by now and then fanning his smoke toward her face. She liked the odor.
They only spoke to each other, as is common with married 10people, when they had something to say, and so were often silent for long spaces. That they had talked a great deal lately in the seclusion of their bedroom, away from the ears of the children, was a reason why they should not be very communicative to-night. They had threshed out the matter foremost in their minds so thoroughly that there could be little to add. Now and then, however, when they were alone, scraps of conversation would occur, part of the long discussion continued from day to day; which fragments, isolated from their context, might have sounded odd enough to any one overhearing.
Thus it was to-night. After half an hour without a syllable, Mrs. Foss’s voice came out of the dark.
“When I was a young girl, there was a music-master, Jerome,” she opened, with no more preface than a shooting-star. “I don’t know that he was particularly fascinating, but he seemed so to me. I suppose he was thirty, I was seventeen or eighteen. It was during my year at Miss Meiggs’s. Whether he really did anything to win my young affections I can’t tell at this distance, but at the time I imagined all sorts of things, that he looked at me differently from the other girls, that his voice was different when he addressed me, that an extreme delicacy was all that kept him from declaring his love. Oh, I used to wish on the first star, and I used to pull daisies to pieces, and I practiced, how I practiced! Well, there was a rich girl in the school, older than I and not nearly so good looking. The moment she graduated he proposed to her. How did I feel? Jerome, the sun went out for good and all the day I heard of their engagement. It was as serious as anything could ever be in this world.–I’m sure I have told you about that music-master before, Jerome.–Well, and what happened? At the 11age of twenty-two I cheerfully married you. And I was not a scarred and burnt-out crater either, was I?... In the interval, let me not neglect to mention, there had been other flirtations and minor affairs. Thank Heaven, those things pass,” the words came out devoutly. “It seems at the time as if only death could end it, but two or three years will do a lot. And it’s God’s mercy makes it so. How else could life be carried on?”
“In my case, Etta,” the consul followed her story, after an interval, “it was a landlady’s daughter. I don’t believe I have ever spoken of her to you. I was in college, but I boarded outside the buildings. I wrote to my father and begged him to let me go into business so that I could earlier support a wife and family. The wise man let me go down to a fruit-farm in Florida. You have noticed that I know something about orange-growing. It was not quite a year before the dear divinity whose name was Lottie found it too long to wait. I posted home. The room I had once rented from her mother was let to a handsomer man. I took up my studies where I had dropped them, and to all appearance there was little harm done. But for a long time I thought I should die a bachelor.”
“I know. Your cousin Fannie told me about it in the early days, before we were engaged. It all goes to show.... And there again was Selina Blackstone, one of my girlhood friends. She had a cough and they thought her lungs affected and sent her South. There she met an unhappy boy in the same case, only he, as it proved, really was in a bad way with his lungs. The poor things fell desperately in love with each other, but her parents wouldn’t hear of their marrying, in which course they were right. Now you would have thought from her face that the separation was going 12to kill her. It didn’t, that’s all. He died, and she married. And it can’t be said of her that she was either shallow, or fickle, or heartless. I knew her very well. Merely, time did the work that time was set to do.”