He sighed, slowly rubbing the back of his head with one hand, while he gazed reflectively at the other. He was confusedly aware of an elusive fragrance about his fingers, the ghost of a perfume, and he had a dazzled consciousness of those wild-fawn eyes, and the red lips, and little pointed chin. He had a guilty recollection, too, of calling his son a young donkey.
He was still sitting there, staring into the vacant fireplace, when he heard the rustle of skirts and felt his wife’s entrance. He did not look up; he seemed to feel an unsympathetic atmosphere, and he heard Mrs. Carter drop into a chair by the table with a heaviness that suggested collapse after an ordeal.
He waited, expectant, but nothing happened. The silence, in fact, grew rather thick. Mrs. Carter sat there, saying nothing, though she swallowed once or twice rather audibly. Unable to endure it any longer, her husband broke the pause.
“She’s mighty pretty,” he said at last, apparently addressing the fireplace.
His wife said nothing. She only turned a slow, absent look toward him, her mind at work on some problem too deep for him.
“Maybe it’ll turn out better than we thought, mama,” he ventured again.
“Maybe,” she assented reluctantly. “Poor Willie.”
“Poor fiddlesticks! He’s in love.” Mr. Carter frowned heavily. “I reckon a man has a right to pick his own wife, anyway,” he decided finally.
Mrs. Carter gave him another mysterious look—a look that seemed to deplore his ignorance. Then she rose, murmured something about supper, and left the room. She was going up the front stairs, but she heard William coming down, and, for the first time in her life, she avoided her first-born. With a feeling of guilty panic, she fled up the back stairs. She could hear the bride still moving about in the best parlor chamber, and she slipped past it and crept softly into Emily’s room.
At the moment her daughter was standing in front of the looking-glass, staring fixedly into it, but Mrs. Carter did not notice this. She shut the door behind her with the air of a conspirator. Her knees felt weak under her, and she needed sympathy, the sympathy of her own sex. Of course, Emily was a child, but she was a girl child.