His manner clearly showed displeasure, almost contempt, and he turned to Miss Beggs. “What do you think?” he demanded. “I understand you have been a school-teacher.”
“Oh, you are quite right,” she responded; “at least about children, and it is clear from them that most parents are idiotically lax.” A blaze of discontent, loathing, surprisingly invaded her pallid face.
“A rod of iron,” August recommended.
The contrast between his wife and Miss Beggs recurred, intensified—one an absolute wreck and the other as solidly slender as a birch tree. Fate had played a disgusting trick on him. In the prime of his life he was tied to a hopeless invalid. It put an unfair tension on him. Women were charming, gracious—or else they were nothing. If Emmy's money had been an assistance at first he had speedily justified its absorption in the business. She owed him, her husband, everything possible. He suddenly pictured mountains of bread, bread towering up into the clouds, fragrant and appetizing; and Emmy, a thing of bones, gazing wistfully at it. August Turnbull, with a feeling like panic, brushed the picture from his mind.
The dessert was apparently a bomb of frozen coffee, but the center revealed a delicious creamy substance flaked with pistache. The cold sweet was exactly what he craved, and he ate it rapidly in a curious mounting excitement. With the coffee he fingered the diminutive glass of golden brandy and a long dark roll of oily tobacco. He lighted this carefully and flooded his head with the coiling bluish smoke. Rosalie was smoking a cigarette—a habit in women which he noisily denounced. She extinguished it in an ash tray, but his anger lingered, an unreasoning exasperation that constricted his throat. Sharply aware of the sultriness of the evening he went hastily out to the veranda.
Morice following him with the evening paper volunteered, “I see German submarines are operating on the Atlantic coast.”
His father asserted: “This country is due for a lesson. It was anxious enough to get into trouble, and now we'll find how it likes some severe instruction. All the news here is bluff—the national asset. What I hope is that business won't be entirely ruined later.”
“The Germans will get the lesson,” Rosalie unexpectedly declared at his shoulder.
“You don't know what you're talking about,” he replied decidedly. “The German system is a marvel, one of the wonders of civilization.”
She turned away, lightly singing a line from one of her late numbers: “I've a Yankee boy bound for Berlin.”