Very frequently they reached the shank of the evening—as often, indeed, as anybody wanted to go home. And in the big fellow's mouth the shank was ever a cogent argument.
Eventually the ultimate question as to their further destination was put, and here the big fellow stood aside, permitting perfect latitude of decision. He was a politician and he knew that he could not possibly afford to have it said by the wives of the ward that he influenced their husbands toward sin. He could afford to have almost everything else said about him, but not that.
Jim wavered, then resisted temptation. His record in that particular respect had been almost absolutely clean.
He walked home stiffly, fighting with the skill of the practiced alcoholic for the upright position and the shortest distance between two points.
His early morbidity had vanished. If he had done one thing badly that evening, he had done another thing well. Whatever his wife, Georgia, might urge against him in regard to his conviviality, wasn't he, after all, one of the most faithful husbands he knew? For all her superior airs, she had much to be grateful for in him.
He entered his flat with little scraping of the keyhole, and cautiously undressed in the front room. It was late—much later than he had hoped for. He could just make out the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece by the light from the street lamp.
He opened the door to their bedroom so slowly, so slowly and steadily, and then—as usual, that cursed hinge betrayed him. The number of times he had determined to oil it—yet he always forgot to. To-morrow he wouldn't forget—that was his flaming purpose.
Psychological flux and flow may be deduced from door hinges as well as from the second cup of coffee for breakfast or the plaintive lady standing immediately before your hard-won seat in the street car. Jim would never oil the hinge in the morning, because that would somehow imply he expected to come in very late again at night, and he never expected to—in the morning.
But her breathing remained regular, absolutely regular; he had this time escaped the snare of the hinge.
The gas jet burned in a tiny flame. She had fallen into the habit of keeping a night-light during the past three or four years. At first he had objected that it interfered with his sleep, but she had been singularly persistent about it. She hadn't given him her reasons; indeed, she had never analyzed them. It was nothing but a bit of preposterous feminism, which she kept to herself, that the light made a third in their room.