“That was not all,” he persisted. “It was more serious than that. I felt something mighty heavy in the atmosphere at times.”
Mrs. Collingwood reflected a few minutes. “Don’t you think,” she said then, “that any woman of mature age—of my age—would hesitate to marry a man of whose family and antecedents she knew as little as I did of yours?”
“No: I don’t see what my family had to do with it. In the first place I haven’t any near relatives living now, as I told you; and if I had, you wouldn’t have married them. You have married me. As for my antecedents (I suppose you mean my conduct), I told you myself that I had been no saint. I’m just a good average citizen. I’ve known better men than I am, and I have known worse. I have not been married before; that’s the main thing, after all; and no woman ever had cause for a breach-of-promise suit against me. I had ——” (he named a man locally prominent) “write to you and tell you that he came from the same town with me, and he knew my record was what I had told you. Besides, I didn’t give a thought to your family, and you have talked less about them than I have talked of mine.”
“That is true. Do you think me secretive? There is nothing to be secretive about. But my life with my relatives was too painful to talk about, even to you.”
“I saw that. I guessed it must have been hard to anybody so loving and tender as you.”
“Martin, when did you form the impression that I am loving and tender?”
“Well, ain’t you?”
“I think so; but most people have not thought so, you know. What made you decide differently?”
“Oh, that first night in the hospital after they had fixed me up in the operating room, and the chloroform wore off, and my fever came up. God! I can feel it all now! And just when I thought that I could not stand things any longer, and must yell, you came along with an ice bag and gave me a piece to suck.” His wife smiled in the darkness at his homely phraseology. “It seemed to me I had never heard a woman’s voice in my life as soft as yours was when you said, ‘You are in great pain, I know.’”
“But that was what I should have done for anybody, Martin.”