Brandon sat staring in front of him. The door opened again and his wife came in.
"That was Samuel Hogg who has just left you?"
"Yes," he said.
He looked across the room at her and was instantly surprised by the strangest feeling. He was not, in his daily life, conscious of "feelings" of any sort--that was not his way. But the events of the past two days seemed to bring him suddenly into a new contact with real life, as though, having lived in a balloon all this time, he had been suddenly bumped out of it with a jerk and found Mother Earth with a terrible bang. He would have told you a week ago that there was nothing about his wife that he did not know and nothing about his own feelings towards her--and yet, after all, the most that he had known was to have no especial feelings towards her of any kind.
But to-day had been beyond possible question the most horrible day he had ever known, and it might be that the very horror of it was to force him to look upon everything on earth with new eyes. It had at least the immediate effect now of showing his wife to him as part of himself, as some one, therefore, hurt as he was, smirched and soiled and abused as he, needing care and kindness as he had never known her to need it before. It was a new feeling for him, a new tenderness.
He greeted and welcomed it as a relief after the horror of Hogg's presence. Poor Amy! She was in as bad a way as he now--they were at last in the same box.
"Yes," he said, "that was Hogg."
Looking at her now in this new way, he was also able to see that she herself was changed. She figured definitely as an actor now with an odd white intensity in her face, with some mysterious purpose in her eyes, with a resolve in the whole poise of her body that seemed to add to her height.
"Well," she said, "what train are you taking up to London?"
"What train?" he repeated after her.