“You have Dosia.”
“Dosia! How would you like to be left with Dosia? I can’t make out that girl. She gets more wooden every day, and if I speak to her she looks as if she thought I was going to beat her. Oh, Justin, stay home this evening—won’t you, dear?”
“I can’t—I wish I could.” He said the words mechanically, for he was burning to get away to Leverich to talk over some matters. “I must be at Selden’s by half-past eight.’
“It is only a quarter-past now—you can walk there in five minutes. Do sit down for a moment. I don’t get any chance to talk to you at all, and you come home so late to dinner that you never see the children any more—except to scold them, as you scolded Redge to-night.”
Lois was sitting under the rays of the lamp. She wore a scarlet gown and held a piece of white embroidery in her lap. She seemed to absorb all the light in the room, and to leave the rest of it dark by contrast—her rosed cheeks, her white eyelids dropped over her work, the bronze waves of her hair melted into the gloom of the background. She was beautiful, but Justin did not care to look at her; it was even momentarily repugnant to him to do so. He sat on the edge of his chair, tapping his hat against it. She lacked the one thing that made a woman beautiful to him; absorbed as he was in his own plans, his own life he felt a loss——
Her remark about the children made him wince. He was a man who loved his children, and he had not only been obliged to lose most of the sweetness of their possession lately,—the sweetness that consists in watching the unfolding, day by day, of the flower-petals of childhood,—but when he had the rare chance of being in their society he could not enjoy it; a hitherto unsuspected capriciousness and irritation laid the precious moments waste. He could hear Zaidee’s gentle little voice repeating her mother’s perfunctory extenuation: “Poor daddy’s nervous; come away, Redge!”
“I hope you’ll tell Mr. Selden that I must have a closet under the stairs,” said Lois suddenly.
“He’ll put one there if he can.”
“If he can! Justin, I spoke about it from the very first. I don’t want the house if he can’t put the closet in. I——”
“All right. I’ve got to go now.” If he had cared to think about it, he might have wondered why she wanted him to wait for such last words as these. As the door closed behind him, she let her embroidery fall from her fingers and listened to the last sound of his footsteps echoing far into the frosty night. There was a firm directness in it as it carried him from her.