“She says she could if she loved him enough,” pursued Mrs. Belmore. “It’s the if that kills her. She says that when she wakes up in the morning that she feels as if she’d die if she didn’t see him before night, and when she does see him it’s all a dreadful disappointment to her; she can’t talk to him at all, she feels perfectly hard and stony; then, the moment he’s gone, she’s crazy to have him back again. She cries herself thin over it.”
“She’s pretty bony, anyway,” said Mr. Belmore impartially.
“Even his appearance changes to her. She says sometimes he looks like a Greek god, so that she could go down on her knees to him, and at other times—Once she happened to catch a glimpse of him in a horrid red sweater, polishing his shoes, and she said she didn’t get over it for weeks, he looked positively ordinary, like some of the men you see in the trolley cars.”
“Oh, good gracious!” protested Mr. Belmore feebly. “Oh, good gracious, petty! This is too much.”
“Hush—don’t laugh so loud—be quiet,” said his wife anxiously.
“If Wilson ever looks like a Greek god to her, she’s all right, she loves him—you can tell her so for me. Wilson! Here are we sitting up here like a pair of lovers, and they—Hello!”
The hall door opened and shut, the piano lid closed simultaneously with a bang, and there was a swirl of skirts again towards the staircase that scattered the guilty pair on the landing. The hostess heaved a patient sigh.
“They shall speak,” said Mrs. Belmore when another hour had gone with the situation still unchanged. Her gentle voice had a note of determination. “I can’t understand why he doesn’t make her. She is literally crying her eyes out, because the whole day has been lost. Why didn’t you send him into the parlor for a book as I told you to, when I came up to take care of Dorothy?”
“He wouldn’t go—he said he wasn’t doing the kindergarten act any more. Hang it, I don’t blame him. A man objects to being made a fool of before people, and he’s tired of it. Here he goes off again to-morrow for two weeks, and she with no more heart than—”
“Where is he now?” asked Mrs. Belmore.