If she had followed the moment’s impulse, she would have risen and left the room, and though better counsel prevailed, she could not control the spice of temper which made the cherry-pie abhorrent.
Jack, as a man, saw no reason why he should deny himself the mitigations of the situation; he helped himself to cream and sifted sugar with leisurely satisfaction, and sensibly softened in spirit. After all, there was a measure of truth in what the old man said, and his bark was worse than his bite. If his own boy, Pat, took it into his head to go off on some scatter-brain prank when he came of age, it would be a big trouble, or if later on he came a cropper in business— Jack waited for a convenient pause, and then deftly turned the conversation to politics, and by the time that cheese was on the table, he and his father-in-law were discussing the mysteries of the last Education Bill with the satisfaction of men who hold similar views on the inanities of the opposite party. Later on they bade each other a friendly good-night; but Edith went straight from the bedroom to the street, and clung tightly to her husband’s arm as they walked along the pavement opposite the Park, enjoying the quiet before entering the busy streets.
“We’ll never come again!” she cried tremulously. “We’ll stay at home, and have a supper of bread and cheese and love with it! You shan’t be taunted and sneered at by any man on earth, if he were twenty times my father! What an angel you were, Jack, to keep quiet, and then talk as if nothing had happened! I was choking with rage!”
“Poor darling!” said Jack Martin tenderly. “You
take things too much to heart. It’s rough on you, but you must remember that it’s rough on the old man too. You are his eldest child, and the beauty of the family. He hoped great things for you, and it is wormwood and gall to his proud spirit to see you struggling along in cheap lodgings. We can’t wonder if he explodes occasionally. It’s wonderful that he is as civil to me as he is; he has put me down as a hopeless blunderer!”
There was a touch of bitterness in the speaker’s voice, for all his brave assumption of composure, and his wife winced at the sound. She clung more tightly to his arm, and raised her face to his with eager comfort.
“Don’t mind what he says! Don’t mind what any one says. I believe in you. I trust you! The good times will come back again, dear, and we will be happier than ever, because we shall know how to appreciate them. Even if we were always poor, I’d rather have you for my husband than the greatest millionaire in the world!”
“Thank God for my wife!” said Jack Martin solemnly.