“Well, you’ve given them plenty of opportunities to make up.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know how.”
She added in a louder tone, “You take Mr. Wilson up to your den for a while, Herbert, Ethel and I are going to have a cozy little time with the children, aren’t we, dear?”
“Have a cigar?” said Mr. Belmore as the two men seated themselves comfortably in a couple of wooden armchairs in the sunny little apartment hung with a miscellaneous collection of guns, swords, and rods, the drawing of a bloated trout and a dusty pair of antlers.
“Thank you, I’m not smoking now,” said Mr. Wilson with a hungry look at the open box on the table beside him.
“Oh!” said his host genially, “so you’re at that stage of the game. Well, I’ve been there myself. You have my sympathy. But this won’t last, you know.”
“Does your wife like smoking?”
“Loves it,” said Mr. Belmore, sinking the fact of his official limit to four cigars a day. “That is, of course, she thinks it’s a dirty habit, and unhealthy, and all that sort of thing, you know, but it doesn’t make any difference to her—not a pin’s worth. Cheer up, old fellow, you’ll get to this place too.”
“Looks like it,” said the other bitterly. “Here I haven’t seen her for a week—I came two hundred miles on purpose yesterday, and now she won’t even look at me. I don’t know what’s the matter—haven’t the least idea—and I can’t get her to tell me. I have to be off to-morrow at seven o’clock, too—I call it pretty hard lines.”
“Let me see,” said Mr. Belmore judicially, knitting his brows as if burrowing into the past as he smoked. “Perhaps I can help you out. What have you been writing to her? Telling her all about what you’ve been doing, and just sending your love at the end? They don’t like that, you know.”