“Yes, these nights when he has come home so late. George Sutton brought him home Tuesday night from the train—he couldn’t walk alone. I was so ashamed at the noise!”
“Oh!” breathed Dosia in a horrified undertone. She added, “Has he always been like this?”
“More or less. At first it was only when he went away; but he couldn’t keep any position long, because he would go away for days and days at a stretch. And now it is getting to be—any time. I’m sure we have done everything in this world to keep it quiet. And Lawson has every advantage naturally; it is only this—drinking. Of course, no one can have any confidence in him; I always felt that it was hopeless, from the first.”
No one had believed in him! Dosia caught at the confirmation as a ray of light gilding this dark and slimy morass, the sight of which had unexpectedly revolted her. In Balderville only the lower class of inhabitants drank; no young man of respectability or position was to be seen among them. But was not this the very kind of trial of her through which she had promised to have faith? He had not posed as devoid of offense; on the contrary, he had confessed to guilt, only she had not quite understood. Sin as plain sin shows a glazed surface, quite decently presentable; it is only when it is particularized that the monstrosities below are hideously revealed.
“It must be a great grief to you,” she said now, with earnestness.
“Yes, it is. Mr. Leverich says I shall not have so much on my mind after this winter; he has put his foot down. The nights I have passed! I’m always fancying that he is run over, or has fallen from the ferry-boat; it’s the most dreadful strain. James, we are to stop for the ice-cream on the way back—don’t forget; and those cakes at Mrs. Springer’s—they were ordered yesterday. Where was I? I forget. Oh, yes—the most dreadful strain! and I felt that I ought to speak about him to you, as you are staying under my care, and yet I hated to. But, of course, after the disturbance, I knew that it was nonsense to try and keep up a pretense any longer. You can see just what he is yourself.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Dosia, grown big-eyed and silent.
Her hostess insisted on her drinking a large cup of hot bouillon on her return, she looked so pale and chilly, relighted the logs in Dosia’s room with her own fat, white, beringed hands, and enveloped the girl enthusiastically several times in a large and perfumed embrace, in confirmation of her new position as a daughter. Dosia was dainty about the manifestations of affection; though she was intensely responsive in spirit to the least show of it, material demonstrations were unnatural to her; she was shy of being touched even by her own sex. It was only with little children that the exuberance of her feeling poured forth in caresses. That the hand-clasp the night of the disaster had appealed so strongly to her imagination was partly because of the fact that the comfort it conveyed transcended the strangeness of contact. To be pressed now to a warm, semimaternal bosom covered with voluminous folds of mauve velvet and lace gave her only an embarrassed gratitude, which she felt, guiltily, as being far from adequate to the occasion. And she was weary of trying to elude the vacillations of her mind. She would keep her promise to Lawson,—yes, yes, indeed! a hundred times more, the more he needed it,—but she would be very careful, too; she would be very careful. A hundred tiny defenses seemed to spring into being.
He was at the dinner as well as Mr. Sutton. The sixth person was Ada Snow, with the well-bred composure which concealed her innate shyness, and in the white dotted swiss she had worn for ten years past, ever since she had graduated, in fact, and which still looked decently presentable. Dosia was gay and conversational, as she was expected to be, the party being hers; she had began to feel the daughter of luxury, if not of Mrs. Leverich, and accepted the honors with the easily accustomed grace that is born of admiration and security, conscious every moment through it all of that bond between herself and Lawson. He looked boyish and happy. Later, in a talk about skating, he offered to teach her to skate the next day if the ice held, and Mrs. Leverich, to whom Dosia looked, expecting her to invent some excuse, approved at once, and planned to send for skates the first thing in the morning. His quizzical eye seized unerringly on the signs of withdrawal in her, and brought the blush of compunction to her cheek, while Mr. Leverich jocosely deplored that he could not take the office of trainer instead. Mr. Sutton, who had sat by her at dinner, and hovered amorously over her in the way a girl detests in a man she does not care for, might have been mysteriously rebuffed by the suggestion of Lawson’s intimacy, for he devoted himself for the rest of the short evening to Ada Snow, who dropped into one of her statuesque angles on an ottoman, and talked to him in her low, trained voice with modestly confidential deference, until he left, quite early. His attention to Miss Snow had not kept him, however, from picking up Dosia’s handkerchief twice when she happened to drop it.
Billy Snow created a diversion by coming in at half-past ten for his sister, and stating casually that he had seen the doctor’s carriage stopping at the Alexander house as he passed.