There was in the lady’s tone an effect of protest against any view, determination against any theory, but her own.
“There are the cases like Miss Seymour’s, however,” Mr. Foss brought in softly, as one calls to another’s attention a lapse of memory or a slip in logic.
“Miss Seymour? Blanche? What about her?”
“That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson. Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her mother–who told me? I think it was Miss Brown–interfered with her marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can’t be sure, Etta.”
“Jerome,” Mrs. Foss’s voice rose to a sharper protest and firmer rejection, “those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to think about. If we begin to think of cases like that....”
She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so much emphasis they must guard against.
13CHAPTER II
Upon a day not much later in the month–a goodly day which thousands without a doubt were thinking all too short for the useful or merely delectable things they wanted to do–a certain young man in Florence would, if he could, have treated this mellow golden masterpiece of autumn’s like a bad sketch, torn it across and dropped it into the waste-basket. What is one to do with a day when nothing that has been invented seems enough fun to pay for the bother? He did not wish to paint, he did not wish to read, or to play on the piano, as he sometimes did in solitude, with one hand, to solace himself by re-framing a remembered melody. He did not wish to go out, but was restless from staying in. He did not want to see the face of friend or foe, but could no longer endure to be alone.
He stood for a moment in the middle of the floor, with his hands over his face, the ends of his fingers pressing back his eyeballs, and got in his throat a taste of the bitter waters which he felt as a perpetual pool in the center of his heart. Next minute he sneered at himself, like a schoolmaster at a boy who blubbers, and without further paltering put on his hat, took up a very slender cane with a slender grasp of yellow ivory, and ran down the long stairs of his house to the street.