"Edith looks healthy," said Mrs. Newbolt; "my dear father used to say he liked healthy females. Old-fashioned word—females. Well, I'm afraid dear father liked 'em too much. But my dear mother—she was a Dennison—pretended not to see it. She had sense. Great thing in married life, to have sense, and know what not to see! Pity Edith's not musical. Have you a cook? I believe she'd have caught you, Maurice, if Eleanor hadn't got in ahead! I brought a chocolate drop for Bingo. Here, Bingo!"
Bingo, silky and snarly, climbed on to her steeply sloping black-satin lap, ate the chocolate drop—keeping all the while a liquid and adoring eye upon his mistress—then slid down and ran to curl up on Eleanor's skirt.
By September the moving and seat building were accomplished—the last not entirely on Edith's account; it was part of Maurice's painstaking desire to do something—anything!—for "poor Eleanor," as he named her in his remorseful thought. There was never a day—indeed, there was not often an hour!—when his own meanness to his wife (combined with disgust at being a liar) did not ache somewhere in the back of his mind. So he tried, in all sorts of anxious ways, to please her. He almost never saw Lily; but the thought of her often brought Eleanor a box of candy or a bunch of violets. Such expenditures were slightly easier for him now, because he had had another small raise,—which this time he had told Eleanor about. On the strength of it he said to himself that he supposed he ought to give Lily a little something extra? So on the day when Mrs. Houghton and Edith were to arrive in Mercer, he went out to Medfield to tell Jacky's mother that she might count on a few dollars more each month. The last time he had seen her, Lily had told him that Jacky "was fussing with his teeth something fierce. I had to hire a little girl from across the street," she said, "to take him out in the perambulator, or else I couldn't 'tend to my cooking. It costs money to live, Mr. Curtis," Lily had said, "and eggs are going up, awful!" She had never gone back to the familiarity of those days when she called him "Curt." That he, dull and preoccupied, still called her Lily gave her, somehow, such a respectful consciousness of his superiority that she had hesitated to speak of anything so intimate as eggs... "Yes, I must give her something extra," Maurice thought, remembering the "cost" of living. "Talk about paying the piper! I bet I'm paying him, all right!"
He was to meet Mrs. Houghton at seven-thirty that night, and it occurred to him that if he told Eleanor he had some extra work to do at his desk he could wedge this call in between office hours and the time when he must go to the station—("and they call me 'G. Washington'!") He felt no special cautiousness in going out to Maple Street; the few people he knew in Mercer did not frequent this locality, and if any of them should chance to see him—a most remote possibility!—why, was he not in the real-estate business, and constantly looking at houses? On this particular afternoon, jolting along in the trolley car, he grimly amused himself with the thought of what he would do if, say, Eleanor herself should see him turning that infernally shrill bell on Lily's door. It was a wild flight of imagination, for Eleanor never would see him—never could see him! Eleanor, who only went to Medfield when their wedding anniversary came round, and she dragged him out to sit by the river and sentimentalize! He thought of the loveliness of that past June—and the contrasting and ironic ugliness of the present September.... Now, the little secret house in the purlieus of Mercer's smoke and grime; then, the river, and the rippling tides of grass and clover, and the blue sky—and that ass, lying at the feet of a woman old enough to be his mother!
He laughed as he swung off the car—then frowned; for he saw that to reach Lily's door he would have to pass a baby carriage standing just inside the gate. He didn't glance into the carriage at the roly-poly youngster. He never, on the rare occasions when he went to see Lily, looked at his child if he could avoid doing so—and she never asked him to. Once, annoyed at Jacky's shrill noisiness, he had protested, frowning: "Can't you keep it quiet? It needs a spanking!" After that indifferent criticism ("For I don't care how she brings it up!") Lily had not wanted him to see her baby. She could not have said just why—perhaps it was fear lest Maurice would notice his growing perfection—but when Jacky's father came she kept Jacky in the background! On this September afternoon she said, as she opened the door:
"Why, you're a great stranger! Come right in! Wait a second till I get Jacky. I've just nursed him and I put him out there so I could watch him while I scrubbed the porch." She ran out to the gate, then pushed the carriage up the path.
"Let me help you," Maurice said, politely; adding to himself, "Damn—damn—!" Stepping backward, he lifted the front wheels, and with Lily's help pulled the perambulator on to the little porch and over the threshold into the house—which always shone with immaculate neatness and ugly comfort. He kept his eyes away from the sleeping face on the pillow. Together they got the carriage into the hall—Lily fumbling all the while with one hand to fasten the front of her dress and skipping a button or two as she did so; but he had a glimpse of the heavy abundance of her bosom, and thought to himself that, esthetically, maternity was rather unpleasant.
"Go on into the parlor and sit down," she said; "I'll put him in the kitchen," She pushed the elaborate wicker perambulator, adorned with bows of blue-satin ribbon, down a dark entry smelling of very good soup stock. When she came back she found Maurice, his hat and stick in his hands, standing in her tiny front room, where the sunny window was full of geraniums and scraggly rose bushes. "I got 'em in early. And I dug up my dahlias—I was afraid of frost. (Mercy! I must clean that window on the outside!) Well, you are a stranger!" she said, again, good-naturedly. Then she sighed: "Mr. Curtis, Jacky seems kind o' sick. He's been coughing, and he's hot. Would you send for a doctor, if you was me?"
"Why, if you're worried, yes," Maurice said, impatiently; "I was just passing, and—No, thank you; I won't sit down. I was passing, and I thought I'd look in and give you a—a little present. If the youngster's upset, it will come in well," he ended, as his hand sought his waistcoat pocket. Lily's face was instantly anxious.
"What! Did you think he looked sick, too? I was kind of worried, but if you noticed it—"