“Tut! tut! tut!” she went on in grave vexation. “We shall have the doctor again if this sort of excitement goes on. Eyes glassy, pulse up, and, I venture to say, headache back of the eyes. Don’t deny it, Mrs. Ashe! I know the signs. Here’s your lunch—after which, we must have the room darkened and try to compose your nerves. It won’t do to have a throw-back at this late day.”
Barton carried off “The Story of Walter King” with him to the library, a little anxious, but more aggrieved. In common with the mighty majority of husbands, he resented Mrs. Gamp the more virulently because impotent against her tyranny.
“Thank Heaven that her time, like her infernal master’s, is short!” growled he, dropping into his easy-chair and throwing his legs over the foot-rest in lordly disdain of appearances. “I suppose women enjoy being hectored, or the sex would rise en masse against this order of haggish humbugs. Agnes didn’t dare peep a defense of herself, or of me. Great Scott! suppose I had been born a woman!”
He lighted a cigar and reopened his book. A luxurious, if lonely, lunch was served at half-past one. Wine and walnuts went with him into the library after the meal was eaten. The air was blue with fragrant smoke for the rest of the day. He did not take the nap he had promised himself as the chief delight of a lazy afternoon, until the last page of “The Story of Walter King” was devoured. Even after he had stretched himself upon the lounge and drawn the silken and eiderdown slumber-robe over him, he lay looking at the purring fire of sea-coal and listening to the muffled tinkle of sleigh-bells along Fifth Avenue, which was but a block distant—and thinking of the book that had enchained him so many hours. It had taken a powerful grip of his imagination and titillated his intellectual palate smartly. There were passages in it that recalled pertinent and pregnant sayings of his own relative to certain topics discussed in the fascinating pages; theories he had advanced and maintained; his very turns of speech were here and there.
Again he said, “I should like to know that man. He has a long head and sharp wits of his own. Immense knowledge of the world and human nature.” Without the least intention of being conceited he subjoined to the silent soliloquy: “If I had turned my attention to literature, I believe I could have written that book. But one man cannot be proficient in everything. The suggestion of feminine authorship is ridiculous. Poor Agnes is a sensible girl, but she is wide of the mark there.”
Here his thoughts wandered into the poppied plains of sleep.
Awaking from his siesta to find himself in the dark, he arose refreshed, and paid a dutiful call to his wife’s chamber before going out to dine at his club. The nurse met him upon the threshold and stepped out into the hall for a whispered colloquy. Both of her charges had been restless all the afternoon. The baby was colicky, Mrs. Ashe feverish and excited, although persisting that nothing ailed her.
“She has an exquisitely susceptible nervous organization,” she continued in the parrotlike lingo of the trained nurse. “We must really guard her more carefully in future. She was talking about that novel in her sleep just now—begging you not to take it away from her and all that, in quite a wild way. There is evidently cerebral excitement. Perhaps, as you are going out, it might be prudent to telephone the doctor to drop in toward bedtime.”
“Oh, a good sleep will set her up all right!” returned Barton slightingly. It did not suit his notions of marital rights to be interviewed and advised in a ghostly whisper without the precincts of his own room, by this pretentious hireling. “The book had nothing to do with her uncomfortable afternoon. It was probably the luncheon. I thought, when you brought it up, that it was more like a meal for a ditcher than for a delicate invalid.”
Pleased at administering this Roland for accumulated Olivers, he ran downstairs without attending to her protest, and whistled softly while equipping himself for the walk through the snow. The night was sharply cold; the drifts were as dry as dust. He laughed like a boy in plowing through them. The return to bachelor freedom was not bad, for a change, and there were sure to be a lot of prime fellows at the club on a stormy holiday night.