Some of this Rachael began to perceive. It was a key to his conduct now. He respected Magsie, he admired her; there was no reason why he should not indulge his admiration. No unspoken criticism from his wife could affect him, because he had seen the whole situation clearly and had decided what was seemly and safe in the matter. Criticism only brought a resentful, dull red color to Warren Gregory's face, and confirmed him more stubbornly in the course he was pursuing. He could even enjoy a certain martyr-like satisfaction under undeserved censure, all censure being equally incomprehensible and undeserved. Rachael had once seen in this quality a certain godlike supremacy, a bigness, and splendidness of vision that rose above the ordinary standards of ordinary men; now it filled her with uneasiness.
"Well," she thought, with a certain desperate philosophy, "in a certain number of months or years this will all be over, and I must simply endure it until that time comes. Life is full of trouble, anyway!"
Life was full of trouble; she saw it on all sides. But what trivial matters they were, after all, that troubled Elinor and Vera and Judy Moran! Vera was eternally rushing into fresh, furious hospitalities, welcoming hordes of men and women she scarcely knew into her house; chattering, laughing, drinking; flattering the debutantes, screaming at the telephone, standing patient hours under the dressmaker's hands; never rested, never satisfied, never stopping to think. Judy Moran's trouble was that she was too fat; nothing else really penetrated the shell of her indolent good nature. Kenneth might be politely dropped from the family firm, her husband might die and be laid away, her brother-in-law commence an ugly suit for the reclamation of certain jewels and silver tableware, but all these things meant far less to Mrs. Moran than the unflattering truths her bedroom scales told her every morning. She had reached the age of fifty without ever acquiring sufficient self-control to rid herself of the surplus forty pounds, yet she never buttered a muffin at breakfast time, or crushed a French pastry with her fork at noon, without an inward protest. She spent large sums of money for corsets and gowns that would disguise her immense weight rather than deny herself one cup of creamed-and-sugared tea or one box of chocolates. And she suffered whenever a casual photograph, or an unexpected glimpse of herself in a mirror, brought to her notice afresh the dreadful two hundred and twenty pounds.
And Elinor had her absurd and unnecessary troubles, rich man's wife as she was now, and firmly established in the social group upon whose outskirts she had lingered so long. The single state of her four sisters was a constant annoyance to her, especially as Peter was not fond of the girls, and liked to allude to them as "spinsters" and "old maids," and to ask more entertaining and younger women to the house. Elinor had never wanted a child, but in the third or fourth year of her marriage she had begun to perceive that it might be wise to give her worldly old husband an heir, much better that, at any cost, than to encourage his fondness for Barbara Oliphant's boy, his namesake nephew, who was an officious, self-satisfied little lad of twelve. But Nature refused to cooperate in Elinor's maternal plans and Peter Junior did not make his appearance at the big house on the Avenue. Elinor grew yearly noisier, more reckless, more shallow; she rushed about excitedly from place to place, sometimes with Peter, sometimes with one of her sisters; not happy in either case, but much given to quarrelsome questioning of life. It was not that she could not get what she wanted so much as that she did not know her own mind and heart. Whatever was momentarily tiresome or distasteful must be pushed out of her path, and as almost every friend and every human experience came sooner or later into this category, Elinor found herself stranded in the very centre of life.
Alice had her troubles, too, but when her thoughts came to Alice, Rachael found a certain envy in her heart. Ah, those were the troubles she could have welcomed; she could have cried with sheer joy at the thought that her life might some day slip into the same groove as Alice's life. Rachael loved the atmosphere of the big, shabby house now; it was the only place to which she really cared to go. There was in Alice Valentine's character something simple, direct, and high-principled that communicated itself to everybody and everything in her household. A small girl in her nursery might show symptoms of diphtheria, a broken tile on the roof might deluge the bedroom ceilings, an old cook leave suddenly, or a heavy rain fall upon a Sunday predestined for picknicking, but Alice Valentine, plain, slow of speech, and slow of thought, went her serene way, nursing, consoling, repairing, readjusting.
She had her cares about George, but they were not like Rachael's cares for Warren. Alice knew him to be none too strong, easily tired, often discouraged. His professional successes were many, but there were times when the collapse of a tiny child in a free hospital could blot from George's simple, big, tender heart the memory of a dozen achievements. The wife, deep in the claims of her four growing children, sometimes longed to put her arms about him, to run away with him to some quiet land of sunshine and palms, some lazy curve of white beach where he could rest and sleep, and drift back to his old splendid energy and strength. She longed to cook for him the old dishes he had loved in the early days of their marriage, to read to him, to let the world forget them while they forgot the world.
Instead, a hundred claims kept them here in the current of affairs. Mary was a tall, sweet, gracious girl of sixteen now, like her father, a pretty edition of his red hair and long-featured clever face. Mary must go on with her music, must be put through the lessoning and grooming of a gentlewoman, and take her place in the dancing class that would be the Junior Cotillion in a year or two. Alice Valentine was not a worldly woman, but she knew it would be sheer cruelty to let her daughter grow up a stranger in her own world, different in speech and dress and manner from all the other girls and boys. So Mary went to little dances at the Royces' and the Bowditches', and walked home from her riding lesson with little Billy Parmalee or Frank Whittaker, or with Florence Haviland and Bobby Oliphant. And Alice watched her gowns, and her hair, and her pretty young teeth only a little less carefully than she listened to her confidences, questioned her about persons and things, and looked for inaccuracies in her speech.
George Junior was a care, too, in these days at the non-committal, unenthusiastic age of fourteen, when all the vices in the world, finger on lip, form a bright escort for waking or sleeping hours, and the tenderest and most tactful of maternal questions slips from the shell of boyish silence and gruffness unanswered. Full of apprehension and eagerness, Alice watched her only son; she could not give him every hour of her busy days; she would have given him every instant if she could. He was a good boy, but he was human. Dressed for dinner and the theatre, his mother would look into the children's sitting-room to find Mary reading, George reading, Martha, very conscious of being there on sufferance, also reading virtuously and attentively.
"Good-night, my darlings! You're going to bed promptly at nine, aren't you, Mary--and Gogo, too? You know we were all late last night," Alice would say, coming in.
"I am!" Mary would give her mother her sunny smile. "Leslie Perry is going to be here to-morrow night, anyway, and we're going to Thomas Prince's skating party in the afternoon, aren't we, Mother?"