“What a wonderful thing marriage is!” David thought, shutting the book he could not read and lapsing contentedly into his golden dream again. He pictured Gay as his happy, simple, busy young wife, pictured them breakfasting on the shabby little east porch of the Keyport house on some summer morning when the peaceful ocean swelled and shone like a stretch of blue Chinese silk. “What a wonderful thing it is to take a woman right out of her own house like that!” David said, with a strange plunging at his heart. “I don’t know that I ever realized just what an extraordinary thing it is, before!”
He began to imagine himself as introducing her to the simple household arrangements there: the little wood stove, the saucepans in which he and Rucker had sometimes scrambled eggs, the odd sketches and “notes” on the walls, the whole slipshod, comfortable little bachelor establishment. And his heart sang at the thought.
He was only Uncle Roger’s stepson, whose income was something like four thousand a year. Gay was—nothing. What they did, where they went, how they spent the little money they had, would be nobody’s business. They would go to Spain, if a few pictures sold at some sale, next year, or the year after—and if they had a child some day, David added in his thoughts, with a little unconscious squaring of his shoulders, and a grin, they would take him with them—drag him along and toughen him, and let Aunt Flora and Sylvia say what they would!
The relief of not having to think of Wastewater, Aunt Flora, and—and, yes, of Sylvia, too, made him feel a sort of shamed joy. In that arrangement he would always have been self-conscious, fighting against nameless and subtle and cramping opposition for his identity and his freedom. If he wanted a studio in Wastewater, he knew just how Sylvia would cushion it and beautify it. If he wanted old Rucker to come up and paint for a while, he knew just how Aunt Flora, abetted by Sylvia, would ask innocently: “How long will Mr. Rucker be with us, David?” He knew—because he had indeed experienced it, when rendering her accounts—exactly how conscientiously and incessantly Sylvia would discuss money matters with him.
“If you are in that neighbourhood, David,” he could imagine her saying pleasantly, “do get those bonds from Crocker and put them in the safety-deposit boxes. I do think it was just a little irregular to leave them there since they aren’t needed.” And, “Will you go over that once again, David? You say they are reorganizing the company and want me to accept these securities for the old—I don’t understand.”
“You only have to sign that certificate, dear; all the other stockholders in the old company are doing it,” he imagined himself responding, for the tenth time.
“Yes, but David, suppose this is so much worthless paper?” Sylvia would ask, intelligently. And Aunt Flora would nod in grave approval and admiration. No cheating Sylvia! “I don’t believe in scribbling my signature anywhere and everywhere,” Sylvia would go on, reinforced. “Please let’s go over it again and again, until it’s all quite clear!”
But with Gay, how simple and easy it would all be! Just their own happy daily plans to discuss, and their own microscopic income to administer. They would go up to Wastewater for Sunday dinner with Sylvia and Aunt Flora, and Gay would really be a Fleming then, and all her old unhappiness forgotten. Who would know—or care!—that beautiful young Mrs. David Fleming had been born outside of Mrs. Grundy’s garden walls? Gay would come in to her husband’s exhibitions, wearing that little velvet gown, or another like it, so vitally eager, so interested, so familiar with every stroke of the brush——
And at this point in his musing David would go back to the beginning again, and think of Wastewater in an April twilight, a week or two from now, and himself arriving there, to find Gay dreaming alone before the fire in the upstairs sitting room. She would raise those star-sapphire eyes and give him that radiant smile, and they would talk about Aunt Lily, and Aunt Flora, and Sylvia, and then he would say suddenly:
“I’ve thought out a real plan for you, Gay! It involves my having a talk with Sylvia, and it involves a little green-and-white farmhouse and barn in Keyport, for which I pay a hundred dollars rent a year, and a plain gold ring——!”