She smothered her disappointment at his rebuff. “You won’t be any good at all at the office; I know you have a dreadful headache. Go upstairs and lie down in the blue room for a while, and nobody will disturb you there.”
“Well!” He gave a grudging assent.
The blue room was white and chilly and unlived in. The stiff pillow-shams rattled down off the pillows as he touched them. He liked his own room, his own bed. The light glared down from the windows. But it was a place where he could be let alone, without those eyes continually waiting upon him to see how he felt. After his debauch of misery all feeling was nauseous to him. He lay stiffly on the cold, straight, unaccustomed bed, and looked with burning eyes at the pictures on the wall. Gradually the rack in his head slackened a little, his eyelids fell shut, he discerned the far-off approach of a blessed ease.
The door opened and his wife came quietly in, unselfishly remembering his needs in the midst of her own fatigue; she had brought a warm coverlet to throw over him. She lowered the shades and went softly out again, taking with her every atom of the peace that he had begun to wrest from a torturing universe.
The younger children talked in the hall; he heard them say,
“Don’t wake father. Hush! Don’t talk so loud.”
Then Loulou screamed, and some one came and took them away forcibly.
Ellen, the waitress, knocked at the door to say that the man had come for the gas bill, and would he pay it? And Miss Candy came afterwards professionally with a cup of hot broth, which she thought he had better drink.
Then Mr. Nichols rose up and took a bath and shaved and went down town.
That day was long remembered in the rooms of the Electrographic Company. Worried heads of departments consulted together; scared clerks went hurrying hither and thither; mistakes were routed out, abuses which had the sanction of custom sternly reformed, lapses from punctuality clinched by new and stringent rules. There was a large arrearage of his own affairs to be attended to, by which he had lost money.