At the Sign of the Rubber Plant
“I wonder what he meant!”
Mrs. Thatcher had risen from the breakfast table from which her husband had departed some time since, after throwing out a mysterious hint about some event in store for her. She had better look out for—what? He had gone before she could question him further.
She went to the front window now, gazing down the street after Bobby, her only child, on his way to the kindergarten. She was a very tall young woman, yet lost none of her femininity by her height; it seemed rather to emphasize it in a willowy droop that always suggested an appealing dependence, in connection with the upward glance of her dark eyes. Her hair was dark, like her eyes, and very thick; her lips were red and curved; her cheeks were usually pale, but there was a faint glow on them now. Nevin had made a terse but complimentary remark about her appearance in that blue cambric morning dress, which she had received with as much innocent surprise as if she had not planned for it. He had also said that he pitied that poor fellow next door whose wife was homely enough to take away his appetite.
Mr. Thatcher’s attitude towards his wife was the subject both of good-natured comment and raillery among her neighbours. His least action towards her was charged, though unobtrusively, with that subtle and intimate attention which one only expects from a lover. He even had a way of helping her up and down the steps that was “different” to the married eye. Patently unintellectual as Mildred Thatcher was, she yet indisputably retained her charm for the man who was intellectual. She had, in fact, that sweet will to be beloved which instinctively foreruns occasion, and makes a place for it in all the little daily matters of life.
“I wonder what he meant! I feel exactly as if somebody would come out from town to-day—it’s such a lovely morning.” She spoke half aloud as she looked down the street through the green feathery foliage of the elms, just out in their spring dress. The sun shone caressingly through them upon the crocuses peeping out in the front grass-plot, and the air, delicately cool, was charged with perfume. There were all the usual adjuncts of spring in the suburbs. A department store wagon was already delivering parcels at a house further down, and several women, fresh and neatly gloved, were alertly stepping trainward to get an early start for the day’s shopping, impelled thither by that soft breeze which woos womankind to the pursuit of clothes. All down the block the palms and rubber plants were being sunned on piazza steps, the former, for the most part, conspicuously brown and withered, but the latter still chunkily green after a winter of furnace heat and dust and gas.
To feel the spring air and not want to spend money was impossible even to Mildred Thatcher, but even if she could have purchased the rug so badly needed for the little drawing-room she would not leave home to-day. She was sure some one would be out from town. She turned now to the maid and gave her orders for luncheon.