“I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,” was one of the things that Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit, and she received the remark with a scant, silent nod.
Two days later he recurred to the subject. They were again upon the terrace, where he had been lounging in an easy-chair most of the day, with the books his sister had bid him read on a table beside him. He had glanced through some of them in a desultory fashion, cutting pages at random here and there, but for the most part he had looked straight before him at the broad landscape, mellowing now into soft browns and yellows under the mild, vague October sun. He had not thought much of the books, but he had a certain new sense of enjoyment in the fruits of this placid, abstracted rumination which perhaps they had helped to induce.
“About your father,” he said now, as his wife, who had come out to speak with him on some other matter, was turning to go away again: “I'm afraid I annoyed you the other day by what I said.”
“I have no recollection of it,” she told him, with tranquil politeness, over her shoulder.
He found himself all at once keenly desirous of a conversation on this topic. “But I want you to recollect,” he said, as he rose to his feet. There was a suggestion of urgency in his tone which arrested her attention. She moved slowly toward the chair, and after a little perched herself upon one of its big arms, and looked up at him where he leant against the parapet.
“I've thought of it a good deal,” he went on, in halting explanation. His purpose seemed clearer to him than were the right phrases in which to define it. “I persisted in saying that I'd do something you didn't want me to do—something that was a good deal more your affair than mine—and I've blamed myself for it. That isn't at all what I want to do.”
Her face as well as her silence showed her to be at a loss for an appropriate comment. She was plainly surprised, and seemingly embarrassed as well. “I'm sure you always wish to be nice,” she said at last. The words and tone were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere a perfunctory note.
“Oh—nice!” he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience with the word. “Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be 'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten thousand times bigger than being 'nice.'”
“I withdraw the word immediately—unreservedly,” she put in, with a smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew so well.
“You laugh at me—whenever I try to talk seriously,” he objected.