Catherine closed his door, and poised an instant in the hall, priming her courage. "Now!" she said, under her breath.
Before she had moved, however, the doorbell clattered, smudging her flame of determination.
Charles came briskly through the hall.
"Oh, you there?" But he went on to the door.
III
It was the Thomases, Mrs. Thomas explaining wordily that they had spent the day in town, luncheon, matinee, dinner, and thought they would just drop in for a time, before the ten-thirty train home.
More than an hour to their train time. To Catherine, let down so suddenly from her peak of resolution, the evening was garbled, like a column in a newspaper struck off from pied type, with words and phrases at random making sense, and all the rest unintelligible. Mrs. Thomas was full of holiday vivacity; the plumes on her black hat quivered in every filament. Those plumes bothered Catherine; she had seen them before, perhaps not at that angle, or perhaps not on that hat. No, they were generic plumes; eternal symbol of the academic wife and her best hat, her prodigious effort at respectable attire.
Mr. Thomas wanted to talk shop, if Charles would permit him. One leg crossed over his knee jerked absently in rhythm as he spoke. A student of his was working on psychological tests for poetic creation, an analysis of the poetic type of thought processes. Against their talk, like trills and grace notes against the base chords, rippled Mrs. Thomas in little anecdotes of Percy, of Clara, of Dorothy, of Walter.
"Walter wanted Spencer to come out for a few days this vacation. Be so nice for him to get into the country. But Percy had a little sore throat, and of course with children you never know what that may mean. I told him perhaps between semesters—the children always have a few days then."
"That's very kind of you." Catherine heard the determined phrases Charles set forth: "The poetic mind is never intellectual. Always purely emotional, intuitive, governed by associative processes." She felt that her smile was a mawkish simper. "To think of adding another child to your household."