“No unkinder word was ever spoken!” cried Fulton cheerfully, and swept the light craft forward with long, splashless strokes.
VI
“It’s beautifully kind of you to want to help; but you see how impossible it is!”
“I don’t like that word,” replied the Poet patiently. “Most things are possible that we really want to do.”
For two hours that morning Mrs. Redfield and he had talked of her troubles, first with a reluctance, a wariness on both sides that yielded gradually to the warmth of his kindness. However, on the whole, the Poet found her easier to talk to than her husband had been. She understood, as Redfield had not, that his appearance in the matter was not merely the assertion of a right inhering in an old friendship, but that it was dictated by something larger,—a resentment of an apostasy touching intimately his own good faith as a public teacher. This attitude had not only its poignancy for her, but it broadened the horizon against which she had been contemplating the broken and distorted structure that had been her life.
“I suppose,” she said bravely, “that we oughtn’t to ask so much! We ought to be prepared for calamity; then we shouldn’t break under it when the blow falls. When I saw other people in just such troubles I used to think, ‘There’s something that will never come to me’: I suppose Miles is right in saying that I have no ambition, that I had become merely a drag on him. And I can see his side of it; there wasn’t much ahead of him but standing behind a bank counter to the end of his days. The novels are full of the conflicts between the man who wants to rise and the woman without wings. It’s my misfortune to be one of the wingless ones.”
She was less bitter than he expected; and he took courage from this fact. He had hoped to avoid any minute dissection of the situation; but she had given him a pretty full account of the whole affair, and he was both dismayed and relieved to find how trivial the details of the dissension proved. She had wept—beyond doubt there had been tears—and Miles on his side had exhausted persuasion before her obstinacy kindled his wrath. The crux had come with his demand that she should do her part toward cultivating acquaintances that he believed to be essential to the success of his new undertaking. She had never known such people, she assured the Poet, feeling that he knew she never had and would sympathize with her position. Miles had no right to ask her to countenance them, and all that.
The Poet preferred to be amused by this. The obnoxious persons were strangers to him; he had merely heard of them; he admitted that he would never deliberately have chosen them for intimate companionship. And yet it was not so egregious a thing to sit at the same table for an hour with a man and woman one wouldn’t care to meet daily.
“If there weren’t such people as the Farnams in the world we’d never know how to appreciate our own kind of folks,” remarked the Poet. “And that fellow can’t be so bad. I heard only recently of an instance of his generosity—he made a very handsome subscription to the new children’s hospital. Men of that stamp frequently grow emotional when they’re touched on the right chord.”
“But you wouldn’t have Miles—the Miles you used to know—become like that, or get down on his knees to such people in the hope of getting some of their money!”