She felt, now, that she could never make him understand how the side of her nature which he saw and knew was bettered and elevated by the healthful action of its twin, to which he was a stranger. She had “put herself into the book,” but not in the lower and vulgar sense in which the reviewers had used the phrase. The aspirations with which others could not intermeddle—least of all, the husband who so grossly misjudged her, the fancies that beguiled Time of heaviness and drew the soreness from her heart while she dallied with them—were there. Her ideals were her real companions; her dream children her only confidants.
“The things which are seen are temporal; the things which are not seen are eternal.”
The author who is not made, but born; the idealist whose brain creations are to him almost visible and tangible, while he communes with them—can, of all men, enter most joyfully into the meaning of the sweet mysticism uttered by the Creator of things temporal and things eternal.
It was a snowy day; transient glimmers of white light, shed from thinner clouds, were the precursors of thicker falls of soundless flakes. There was no wind, and as Agnes watched the storm between the slightly parted blinds, a curtain of purest lace seemed unfolding and wavering earthward. The hush of a great holiday enwrapped the city. Baby Nest slumbered peacefully amid billows of lawn and wool; the strong, mobile features of the husband she loved and feared more than any other living mortal darkened and lightened like the snow clouds, with the progress of the story. He read well, and threw unusual spirit into the present task.
Agnes hearkened, with a growing sense of unreality. The disowned child pressed nearer and closer, gazed appealingly into her face, cooed love words in her ear, covered with kisses the hands with which the hapless mother was constrained to hold it aloof from the heart that yearned to take it in.
Sometimes Barton’s voice sounded a great way off, and she confused his utterances with the winged ideas she had formulated into human language. Was she thinking it all out? or was he enunciating what she had thought through the languorous summer days and cool autumn evenings? She used to wonder, amusedly, what he supposed she did during the many hours she spent in solitude. He never asked, but if he had deemed the matter worthy of speculation, he might have reasoned that a woman who did not make her own clothes and had no taste for fancy work, whose house was well appointed and not large, and whose health was good must, with two servants to do housework and cooking, have much time upon her hands.
“How do women occupy themselves who keep plenty of servants and do not write, paint, or study anything in particular?” asked the young son of a woman who kept house, wrote books, painted pictures, and studied with her children.
“They make a profession of horacide!” answered the mother.
Barton lowered the book so abruptly that his wife started and clasped her hands involuntarily. She was very weak.