"Oh, is that your reason?" she said, laughing.
"Say, Star, would you mind moving? I was just reading—"
She rose, and, going over to the window, stood looking out at the streaming rain in one of those empty silences which at first had been so alluringly mysterious to him. She was waiting for his hand on her shoulder, his kiss on her hair—but he was immersed in his paper. "How can he be interested about football, now, when we're alone?" she thought, wistfully. Then, to remind him of lovelier things, she began to sing, very softly:
"Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
0 sweet content!
To add to golden numbers, golden numbers,
O sweet content!—0 sweet, O sweet content—"
He dropped his paper and listened—and it seemed as if music made itself visible in his ardent, sensitive face! After a while he got up and went over to the window, and kissed her gently ...
Maurice was very happy in these first months in Mercer. The Weston office liked him—and admired him, also, which pleased his young vanity!—though he was jeered at for an incorrigible and alarming truthfulness which pointed out disadvantages to possible clients, but which—to the amazement of the office—frequently made a sale! As a result he acquired, after a while, several small gilt hatchets, presented by the "boys," and also the nickname of "G. Washington." He accepted these tributes with roars of laughter, but pointed to results: "I get the goods!" So, naturally, he liked his work—he liked it very much! The joy of bargaining and his quick and perhaps dangerously frank interest in clients as personalities, made him a most beguiling salesman; as a result he became, in an astonishingly short time, a real force in the office; all of which hurried him into maturity. But the most important factor in his happiness was his adoration of Eleanor. He was perfectly contented, evening after evening in the hotel, to play her accompaniments (on a rented piano), read poetry aloud, and beat her at solitaire. Also, she helped him in his practicing with a certain sweet authority of knowledge, which kept warm in his heart the sense of her infinite superiority. So when, later, they found a house, he entered very gayly upon the first test of married life—house furnishing! It was then that his real fiber showed itself. It is a risky time for all husbands and wives, a time when it is particularly necessary to "consider the stars"! It needs a fine sense of proportion as to the value, relatively, of peace and personal judgment, to give up one's idea in regard, say, to the color of the parlor rug. Maurice's likes and dislikes were emphatic as to rugs and everything else,—but his sense of proportion was sound, so Eleanor's taste,—and peace,—prevailed. It was good taste, so he really had nothing to complain of, though he couldn't for the life of him see why she picked out a picture paper for a certain room in the top of the house! "I thought I'd have it for a smoking room," he said, ruefully; "and a lot of pink lambs and green chickens cavorting around don't seem very suitable. Still, if you like it, it's all right!" The memory of the night on the mountain, when Eleanor gave all she had of strength and courage and fear and passion to the saving of his life—made pink lambs, or anything else, "all right"! When the house-furnishing period was over, and they settled down, the "people" Eleanor didn't want to see, seemed to have no particular desire to see them; so their solitude of two (and Bingo, who barked whenever Maurice put his arms around Eleanor) was not broken in upon—which made for domestic, even if stultifying, content. But the thing that really kept them happy during that first rather dangerous year, was the smallness of their income. They had very little money; even with Eleanor's six hundred, it was nearer two thousand dollars than three, and that, for people who had always lived in more or less luxury, was very nearly poverty;—for which, of course, they had reason, so far as married happiness went, to thank God! If there are no children, it is the limited income which can be most certainly relied upon to provide the common interest which welds husband and wife together. This more or less uncomfortable, and always anxious, interest, generally develops in that critical time when the heat of passion has begun to cool, and the friction of the commonplace produces a certain warmth of its own. These are the days when conjugal criticism, which has been smothered under the undiscriminating admiration of first love, begins to raise its head—an ugly head, with a mean eye, in which there is neither imagination nor humor. When this criticism begins to creep into daily life, and the lure of the bare shoulder and perfumed hair lessens—because they are as assured as bread and butter!—it is then that this saving unity of purpose in acquiring bread and butter comes to the rescue.
It came to the rescue of Maurice and Eleanor; they had many welding moments of anxiety on his part, and eager self-sacrifice on her part; of adding up columns of figures, with a constantly increasing total, which had to be subtracted from a balance which decreased so rapidly that Eleanor felt quite sure that the bank was cheating them! Of course they did not appreciate the value of this blessed young poverty—who of us ever appreciates poverty while we are experiencing it? We only know its value when we look back upon it! But they did—or at least Eleanor did—appreciate their isolation, never realizing that no human life can refresh another unless it may itself drink deep of human sympathies and hopes. Maurice could take this refreshment through business contacts; but, except for Mrs. O'Brien, and her baby grandson, Don, Eleanor's acquaintances in Mercer had been limited to her aunt's rather narrow circle.
When Mrs. Newbolt got back from Europe, Maurice was introduced to this circle at a small dinner given to the bride and groom to indicate family forgiveness. The guests were elderly people, who talked politics and surgical operations, and didn't know what to say to Maurice, whose blond hair and good-humored blue eyes made him seem distressingly young. Nor did Maurice know what to say to them.
"I'd have gone to sleep," he told Eleanor, in exploding mirth, on their way home, "if it hadn't been that the food was so mighty good! I kept awake, in spite of that ancient dame who hashed up the Civil War, just to see what the next course would be!"
It was about this time that Maurice began to show a little longing for companionship (outside the office) of a kind which did not remember the Civil War. His evenings of solitaire and music were awfully nice, but—