“I do know—it’s one of the cheapest kinds there are. Nevin, I can’t have it in here, you must understand that. Why, I couldn’t eat my meals if I had to look in and see it. Can’t you take it back and change it?”
“Change it!”
Mildred had known, even as she spoke, that the suggestion was unforgivable. She could go to town merrily, day after day, exchanging goods, but her husband would have felt like a sneak thief if he had taken anything back to “change it.”
“No, I can not!” His anger was at last aroused, and thoroughly. “If you don’t like the thing you can chuck it out into the street, for all I care. I tried to give you a pleasure, and this is what I get for it. I’ll never buy you another thing as long as I live!”
It was on the tip of Mrs. Thatcher’s tongue to say, “I hope you won’t,” but this time something restrained her. There were but few times that she had seen her husband as angry as this, and never at her, though there might have been more provocative occasions. He had bought many things before which she had not liked, without any real friction between husband and wife—it was one of “his” ways which they had often laughed over. But each day’s path is different from that of yesterday—what has been a convenient stone to rest on before becomes unexpectedly a stumbling-block in the way. Mr. Thatcher’s wrath, indeed, gathered its greatest force from the underlying knowledge that he might have done differently.
The subject was dropped at dinner, but Mrs. Thatcher could not forbear beginning on it again afterwards. Nevin must see how dreadful it was to have that rug, if it was properly put to him. But he stopped her after the first tearful expostulations.
“Never say ‘rug’ to me again,” he commanded briefly. “You’ve said too much already.” He read a magazine all the evening, and after a while she went up-stairs and lay down on the edge of Bobby’s little bed, beside her sleeping child, and wept.
It was unbelievable, unbearable, that he could buy that horrible thing without her! And there was no other place in the tiny house to put it. When she looked at it in the morning it was worse even than she had dreamed—it put her teeth on edge. The home didn’t seem like hers! She averted her face from it patiently at breakfast, and her mouth drooped pathetically, but Nevin only read his paper and kissed her unseeingly when he left. When he was gone, she and Kitty rolled the rug up into a corner. If any one came they could think she was cleaning house.
And on the morrow, and the morrow after, the rug, like a malevolent force, still separated them. She would have given it away if she could have afforded to have done so. As time went on there was a certain change in her own way of regarding it. Still she had that choked sensation when she thought of his going and buying it without her, but she did not think of it as often. She began to discern that she had lost something inconceivably more precious than the sublimated rug of her fancy. It was not only that Nevin had no longer any desire to buy her anything, but there was a subtle reservation of spirit. In that fit of unreasoning passion she had lost some attraction for him, some of that aureole of romance which is at once the most intangible and the dearest possession of the married, for which a woman may indeed keep her most shining thought, her sweetest care. What was any rug compared with her husband’s sentiment for her? Yet it was not a mere rug to her, but one of the symbols of a home. Did she love him ten times more, the sight of that cheap and glaring inconsistency would bring the vexed tears to her eyes. She knew her limitations by instinct—it was no use to try and laugh at being parted by a colour scheme—never could she be heroically strong enough to move and have her being as if the rug were not there.
For nine days Mildred Thatcher lived as her neighbours, a life as thick and solid, as uninformed with the spirit as the rubber plant which stood neglected in the drawing-room by the pile of books—as yet unshelved—and the dusty upright piano. The palms had gone to the florist’s, and she had no heart to take the rubber plant in and out each day. She did not care whether the thing died or not. She did not care for anything. Every night when Nevin came home, she greeted him as calmly and affectionately as he greeted her, and waited, tingling, for developments which never came. The rug, which dominated her every waking moment, had, indeed, been almost forgotten by him—pressed out of sight, as is a man’s wont with disagreeable domestic happenings, only the unpleasant impression remaining. He read or went to sleep on the sofa, and they both spent some evenings out. After a week had passed, and while Mildred was waiting for the change in her husband’s manner, it suddenly came over her with a strange shock that he was not only losing his delicate perception of her, but that he was growing content without it. It is so easy to lapse to the lower level! They were getting into the rut that only grows the deeper with travel.