This was the night at last that my husband’s play was to go on, the plot of which he had developed from a mystery that I had suggested one morning a year ago, when I used to wake up so happily, full of ideas. I did not rise as exuberantly now. I hated to get up at all. Our studio was crowded with things and with people that we did not want from morning until night, and from night until morning again. It had become my chief duty to sort out all the component parts of our ménage, producing just the influences that would further the work of my husband and suppressing all others. To-day I had been answering questions constantly on the telephone, from complaints about the box-office, with which I had nothing at all to do, to reproaches from the ingénue because she could not find the author. It seemed to me, thinking it over while pressing out the dress I was going to wear, that Myrtle was spending altogether too much time looking for my husband. Just because he wrote the play and she was acting in it was no reason that I could see why she should lunch with him every day. I sometimes wished that all of these young girls who thought it was part of their education to flirt with him could have the pleasure of getting him his breakfast every day, as I did, and of waiting up for him for a thousand and one nights.
I did not reproach Jasper; I loved him too much for that. When one is jealous it is the contortions of a member of his own sex, of whom he is suspicious, not the dear one upon whom he is dependent for happiness. A woman will drop her best friend to save her husband, without letting him know she has done so.
I blamed the city in which we worked for most of the confusion. Had we lived in some other place, it would have been in a saner way. And Jasper could have lived anywhere he chose; he carried his earning capacity in his imagination. Nowhere are conditions so mad as in New York, so enticingly witless. In this arcade building, cut up in its old age into so-called living apartments, with rickety bridges connecting passages that had no architectural relation to each other, whispers followed one in bleak corridors and intrigue loafed on the stairs. We had outgrown unconventional (which is the same as inconvenient) housekeeping. Jasper was getting bored and I was becoming querulous before our married life had been given any opportunity to expand. Dogs were not allowed in our arcade; children would have been a scandal.
Thinking of the big rooms in that cool, quiet house on the cape during the hot month of September, I could not help longing to be there, and I had written several times to the judge. Thus I knew that Mattie “Charles T. Smith” had once more refused to vacate, and unless we were coming up there immediately, the judge would not evict her before spring.
“We ought to decide something,” I was saying to myself, when I heard my husband coming down the hall, and my heart forgot forebodings. I hurried to hide the ironing-board, there still being a pretense between us that it was not necessary to do these things, and put on the tea-kettle.
Jasper was tall and angular, with wispy light hair always in disorder above a high forehead and gray eyes wide open in happy excitement. He looked straight into life, eager to understand it, and never seemed to know when it came back at him, hitting him in the face. He had that fortunate quality of making people take him seriously, even his jokes. In a world eager to give him what he wanted, I was proud that he still chose me, and prayed that he might continue.
He was pathetically glad to get some hot tea, assuring me that the play was rotten, that the manager was a pig, and that none of the actors knew their business. He had been with them all day.
“Jasper,” I said, after I had given him all the telephone messages, to which he paid no heed at all, “have you any idea of taking that house on Cape Cod this fall?”
Jasper went on looking through his papers as if he had not heard me.
“Where is that correction I made last night for Myrtle?” he asked.