“What’s the matter now?” he asked good-naturedly. Never that tone but something was out of kilter.
His wife glanced wrathfully at his feet. Wonderingly he looked down. In the heat of the battle with his cravat he had forgotten all about his tennis shoes.
“I see. No soup for mine.” He went back to his room, philosophically. There was always something wrong when he got into these infernal clothes.
“Mother,” said Nora, “why can’t you let him be?”
“Who cares? He’s the patientest man I know. We’re always nagging him, and I for one am going to stop. Look about! So few men and women dress for dinner. You do as you please here, and that is why I like it.”
“I shall never be able to do anything with him as long as he sees that his mistakes are being condoned by you,” bitterly responded the mother. “Some day he will humiliate us all by his carelessness.”
“Oh, bother!” Nora’s elbow slyly dug into Celeste’s side.
The pianist’s pretty face was bent over her soup. She had grown accustomed to these little daily rifts. For the great, patient, clumsy, happy-go-lucky man she entertained an intense pity. But it was not the kind that humiliates; on the contrary, it was of a mothering disposition; and the ex-gladiator dimly recognized it, and felt more comfortable with her than with any other woman excepting Nora. She understood him perhaps better than either mother or daughter; he was too late: he belonged to a distant time, the beginning of the Christian era; and often she pictured him braving the net and the trident in the saffroned arena.
Mrs. Harrigan broke her bread vexatiously. Her husband refused to think for himself, and it was wearing on her nerves to watch him day and night. Deep down under the surface of new adjustments and social ambitions, deep in the primitive heart, he was still her man. But it was only when he limped with an occasional twinge of rheumatism, or a tooth ached, or he dallied with his meals, that the old love-instinct broke up through these artificial crustations. True, she never knew how often he invented these trivial ailments, for he soon came into the knowledge that she was less concerned about him when he was hale and hearty. She still retained evidences of a blossomy beauty. Abbott had once said truly that nature had experimented on her; it was in the reproduction that perfection had been reached. To see the father, the mother, and the daughter together it was not difficult to fashion a theory as to the latter’s splendid health and physical superiority. Arriving at this point, however, theory began to fray at the ends. No one could account for the genius and the voice. The mother often stood lost in wonder that out of an ordinary childhood, a barelegged, romping, hoydenish childhood, this marvel should emerge: her’s!