However, in spite of Eleanor, sitting on the other side of the fire, in bitter silence, those Sunday afternoons were delightful to Edith. She and Maurice were more serious with each other now. His feeling about her was that she was a mighty pretty girl, who had sense, and who, as he expressed it, "spoke his language." Her feeling about him was a frankly expressed appreciation which Eleanor called "flattery." She had an eager respect for his opinions, based on admiration for what she called to herself his hard-pan goodness. "How he keeps civil to Eleanor, I don't know!" Edith used to think. Sometimes, watching his civility—his patience, his kindness, and especially his ability to hold his tongue under the provocation of some laconic and foolish criticism from Eleanor—Edith felt the old thrill of the Sir Walter Raleigh moment. Yes; there was no one on earth like Maurice! Then she thought, contritely, of good old Johnny. "If I hadn't known Maurice, I might have liked Johnny," she thought; "he is a lamb." When she reflected upon Eleanor, something in her generous, careless young heart hardened: "She's not nice to Maurice!" She had no sympathy for Eleanor. Youth, having never suffered, is brutally unsympathetic. Edith had known nothing but love,—given and received; so of course she could not sympathize with Eleanor!
When the Sunday-night suppers were over, Eleanor and Maurice escorted their guest back to Fern Hill; Edith always said, "Don't bother to go home with me, Eleanor!" And Maurice always said, "I'll look after the tyke, Nelly, you needn't go"; and Eleanor always said, "Oh, I don't mind." Which was, of course, her way of "locking the door" to keep her cat from a roof that became more alluring with every bolt and bar which shut him from it.
On these trolley rides through Medfield Maurice was apt to be rather silent, and he had a nervous way of looking toward the rear platform whenever the car stopped to take on a passenger—"although," he told himself, "what difference would it make if Lily did get on board? She's so fat now, Edith wouldn't know her. And as for Lily, she's white. She'd play up, like a 'perfect lady'!"
He was quite easy about Lily. He hadn't seen her for more than a year, and she made no demands on him. She was living in the two-family house on Ash Street, with the dressmaker and her three children and feeble-minded father, in the lower flat. There was the desired back yard for Jacky, where a thicket of golden glow lounged against the fence, and where, tinder stretching clothes lines, a tiny garden overflowed with color and perfume. Every day little Lily would leave her own work (which was heavy, for she had several "mealers") and run downstairs to help Mrs. Hayes wash and dress the imbecile old man. And she kept a pot of hyacinths blooming on his window sill.
Maurice (with grinding economies) sent her a quarterly money order, and felt that he was, as he expressed it to himself, "square with the game,"—with the Lily-and-Jacky game. He could never be square with the game he played with Eleanor; and as for his own "game," his steadily pursued secretiveness was a denial of his own standards which permanently crippled his self-respect. Though, curiously enough, these years of careful lying had made him, on every subject except those connected with the household in Medfield, of a most scrupulous truthfulness. Indeed, the office still called him "G. Washington."
Jacky was six that winter—a handsome, spoiled little boy. He looked like Maurice—the same friendly, eager, very bright blue eyes and the same shock of blond hair. Lily's ideas of discipline were, of course, ruining him, to which fact Maurice was entirely indifferent; his feeling about Jacky was nothing but a sort of spiritual nausea; Jacky was not only an economic nuisance, but he had made him a liar! He said to himself that of course he didn't want anything to happen to the brat ("that would break Lily's heart!"), but—
Then in March, something did happen to him. It was on a Sunday that the child came down with scarlet fever, and Lily, in her terror, did the one thing that she had never done, and that Maurice, in his certainty of her "whiteness," felt sure she never would or could do: she sent a telegram—to his house!
It had been a cold, sunny day. Just before luncheon Eleanor had been summoned to Mrs. O'Brien's: "Donny is kind of pining; do please come and sing to him, Miss Eleanor," the worried grandmother wrote, and Eleanor hadn't the heart to refuse. "I suppose," she thought, looking at Maurice and Edith, "they'll be glad to get rid of me!" They were squabbling happily as to whether altruism was not merely a form of selfishness; Edith had flung, "Idiot!" at Maurice; and Maurice had retorted, "I never expect a woman to reason!" It was the kind of squabbling which is the hall mark of friendship and humor, and it would have been impossible between Eleanor and her husband.... She left them, burning with impatience to get down to Mrs. O'Brien's and back again in the shortest possible time. As soon as she was out of the house Maurice disposed of altruism by a brief laying down of the law:
"There's no such thing as disinterestedness. You never do anything for anybody, except for what you get out of it for yourself.... Let's go skating?"
The suggestion was not the result of premeditation; Maurice, politely opening the front door for his wife, had realized, as he stood on the threshold and a biting wind flung a handful of powdery snow in his face,—the sparkling coldness of the day; and he thought to himself, "this is about the last chance for skating! There'll be a thaw next week." So, when he came back, whistling, to the library, he said: "Are you game for skating? It's cold as blazes!"