“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Thatcher wearily. “Yes, I suppose you’ll have to; we can’t leave the box here.” She looked over at the tiny drawing-room, with its little spindle-legged mahogany tea-table, the low well-filled bookcase, the rattan sofa with its bright pillows, and the small upright piano, and then at the solid pile of information at her feet. There were thirty volumes—for she had counted them—thirty volumes pressed down and running over with the Literature of All Nations.
“I suppose you’ll have to pile them up in the corner over there. I’m sure I don’t know what to do with them.”
“And shall I put the lunch on now, ma’am?”
“Is it time? Oh, yes; Bobby is coming in. Yes, put it on.”
Croquettes and pop-overs and the violet centerpiece for this arrival by express, indeed! She felt unaccountably defrauded—a sensation that lingered with her throughout the whole afternoon, and tinged her with melancholy, even when she responded to the playful overtures or the needs of Bobby, who kept continually running in from the back yard to have his ball mended, or a string tied to something. He struggled away from her when she wanted to kiss him, and he smelled indescribably of earth. He was of the sex which grew up to have strange ways and alien tastes—he even had them now. Mrs. Thatcher had not wanted a boy, although she loved this one devotedly. She longed inexpressibly sometimes for a dear little gentle, clinging girl, who could be frivolously dressed in soft, white, ruffly things, and have her sweet hair curled.
Mildred Thatcher could never help a mysteriously hurt feeling when her Nevin spent his money for books, or indeed for anything apart from her, of his own volition; there were always so many things needed perennially by “the house,” not to speak of her own wardrobe. Her feminine mind was incapacitated by nature from seeing anything from a man’s point of view—it was from the sheer force of her love alone that she leapt the chasm between them. It was from the heart, not the mind, that she divined what she did of him, as the blind see through feeling finger-tips. And even when she could not perceive how he wanted his own way—nay, when she had protested against it with intensity—after she had once proved herself in the right, she was apt to be overtaken by a sweet, fiercely unreasoning desire that he should have everything he wanted, just because he wanted it, and because he would love her better if he did, and she would grovel, and cringe, and eat her words unblushingly, in her efforts to drive him back into his own path. If she used all her energy now to making him send that wealth of literature back where it came from, she would probably labour still harder the next day to make him get it again.
There was an aloofness in her greeting, when he came home a little earlier than usual, which he was unusually quick to detect. His eyes were agreeably expectant, with none of the deprecation in them which she had looked for. Mr. Thatcher himself was one of Mildred’s inconsistencies. She had sworn that she would never marry any but a very tall man, yet her Nevin, stalwart and broad-shouldered as he was, did not top the highest roll of her dark hair.
“What’s the matter?” His hand lingered on her shoulder. “Don’t you feel well?”
“Oh, yes—pretty well.”
“Did you get the package I sent by express?”