The truth was that Moses Slade really wanted a skinny young thing of twenty, but a Congressman who wrote “Honorable” before his name couldn’t afford to make a fool of himself. He couldn’t afford to marry a silly young thing, or ever get “mixed up” with a woman. A man of fifty-five who kept wanting to pinch arms and hips had to be careful. If he could only pinch, just one pinch, some one like—well, some one as plump as Mrs. Downes, he’d feel like a boy again. He felt that youth would flow back again into him through the very tips of the pinching fingers. It wasn’t much—just wanting to pinch a girl. Why did people make such a fuss about it?
He almost convinced himself that a full-blown rose like Emma Downes was far better than a skinny young thing. There was, too, of course, the Widow Barnes, who lived next door, still in her prime, and with a large fortune as well.
He took up the Congressional Record, and tried to lose himself in its mountains and valleys of bombast and boredom, but in a little while the book lay unnoticed on his heavy thighs and he was arguing with the other Moses Slade across the desk.
Suddenly, as if he had been roused from a deep sleep, he again found himself talking aloud. “Well,” he thought, “something has got to be done about this.”
11
Meanwhile Emma, walking briskly along beneath the maples of Park Avenue, found her mind all aglitter with interesting projects. She often said that she always felt on the crest of the wave, but to-day it was even better than that; she felt almost girlish. Something had happened to her, while she sat with Moses Slade, consoling him and accepting his consolations. He had noticed her. She marked the look in his eye and noticed the fingers that drummed impatiently the fine edge of his black serge mourning trousers. A man behaved like that only when a woman made him nervous and uneasy. And as she walked, there kept coming back to her in a series of pictures all the adventures of a far distant youth, memories of sleighrides and church suppers, of games of Truth and Forfeits. There was a whole gallery of young men concerned in the flow of memories—young men, tragically enough, whom she might have married. They were middle-aged or oldish now, most of them as rich and distinguished as Moses Slade himself. Somehow she had picked the poorest of the lot, and so missed all the security that came of a sound husband like Slade.
Well (she thought), she wasn’t sorry in a way, for she had been happy, and it wasn’t too late even now to have the other thing—wealth, security. She’d made a success of her business, and could quit it now with the honest satisfaction of knowing it hadn’t defeated her—quit it, or, better still, pass it on to Philip and Naomi, if he were still sure that he wouldn’t go back to Megambo. Perhaps that was the way out—to let him take it off her shoulders, and so bring him out of those filthy mills where he was disgracing them all. But then (she thought), what would she do with no work, nothing on which to center her life? It wasn’t as if she were tired: she’d never felt as well in her life as in this moment moving along under the slightly sooty maples. No, she couldn’t settle down to doing nothing, sitting at home rocking like Naomi and Mabelle. (She fairly snorted at the thought of Mabelle.) Of course, if she married again, married some one like Moses Slade—not Moses Slade, of course (she scarcely knew him), but some one like him. Such a thing wasn’t impossible, and with a husband of his age marriage couldn’t be very unpleasant. She could go to Washington and do much good for such causes as temperance and woman suffrage.
And then, abruptly, her thoughts were interrupted by the voice of some one speaking to her.
“How do you do, Mrs. Downes?” Looking up, she saw it was Mary Watts ... now Mary Conyngham ... looking pale and rather handsome in her widow’s clothes.
“Why, Mary Watts, I haven’t seen you in ever so long.”