She puts her hand on his arm.
"You will sit inside with us?"
"Of course, if you wish it. I would not have proposed the box-seat if I had known you would not like it, Addie. I never thought of the weather. Why, I have slept out of doors in Canadian backwoods in three times as severe weather as this, and I'm alive to tell the tale—ah, scores of times!"
The drive is an uncomfortable one for all three, though Pauline, anxious to remove the impression of the scene, rattles "nineteen to the dozen." Her sister speaks not a word, and Armstrong is too wrapped up in somber, anxious thought to respond.
Clearly as one would read an open book, he can now read the page of his little wife's troubled life—can read the meaning of flushing cheek, quivering lip, tearful eye—can see the passion of revolt that stirs her sensitive being—can feel how her pride, her delicacy is daily, hourly, outraged by the condition of their lives—and his heart yearns over her.
"If," he thinks, with an impotent sigh, "I had chosen the other sister, it would have been different; her coarser, more selfish nature would have adapted itself to the circumstances without a pang. She would have accepted without murmur or protest the best I had to give, would have put her hands into my pocket and spent my money with the freedom and insouciance of esteemed wifehood, would never have disturbed my equanimity by one of those piteous pleading looks, half pain, half defiance, that thrill through me with a foreboding of coming tragedy. I wonder how it will all end! Why will she not accept the inevitable, and give me peace at least? Peace is all I ask from her. If she would take things as her sisters and her brothers do, I should in time become reconciled to my fate, should learn to feel toward her as I feel toward them; but she will not—she will not. She will go her own way, and keep my heart in a ferment, watching her every movement, straining my ears to catch every tone of her ever-changeful voice."
He looks with a sort of admiring impatience at her, as she sits by his side, her eyes closed, the trace of tears staining her flushed cheeks, and something tells him that it will always be so between them, that she will never harden, never learn to eat his bread with the easy unconsciousness of her kindred, never suffer him to despise her, and thus emancipate himself.
Armstrong is an epicure in sexual sentiment. He can love no woman whom he cannot esteem. The loveliest face shielding a venal soul has no attraction for him; and women for the possession of whose frail fairness men in his rank of life have bartered the hard-earned wages of years, have abandoned home, wife, and children, to him are as innocuous as the homeliest-featured crone. Having always been a comparatively successful man, in his many wanderings he has been waylaid by harpies of various nationalities, experienced in attack; but honeyed speech or melting glance has never charmed a guinea from his pocket or a responsive smile from his granite lips—and this through no sense of moral or religious rectitude, but simply because he can not value the favoring of any woman in whom self-respect does not govern every other feeling, sway every action of her life. The woman he loves shall be a lady to the core, pure-minded, dainty, sensitive, and proud. In his wife he recognizes these qualities, and worships them accordingly; and yet, with the perverse selfishness innate even in the best of mankind, he would fain see her stripped of them all in order to shake himself free from her thralldom and heal up the wound she has unwittingly dealt his pride and self-esteem.
He knows, if she can but lower herself in his eyes by some act of meanness, folly, or ingratitude, her downfall will be permanent, and he will regain the even tenor of his life, and be his own master again.