"Oh, Addie, I have no patience with you! You talk of your husband as if he were a stranger, a complete outsider—as if we had no interest in him or he in us; it is a shame! I protest I understand him better than you. I saw at once that it was a pleasure to him to give me a dress; and I foresee too that it will give him pleasure to see me fashionably and becomingly got up on the 16th. I'm determined not to balk him. I think your feeling in the matter is both unnatural and absurd—absurd in the extreme!"
Miss Lefroy has her way, and that same afternoon is fingering gauzes, satins, and laces at Madame Armine's. Her sister, seeing that it would be of no use venturing on delicate ground again, with a feeling of impotence to wrestle against her will in particular, and the tide of events in general, gives in with a weary sigh.
On the night of the 16th Armstrong is standing under the drawing-room chandelier, anxiously working his large bony hands into a pair of evening gloves of treacherous texture and about half a size too small for him, when his womenfolk rustle in, fully equipped for conquest.
"Do you like me, Tom?"
He looks down at his wife standing before him in the bridal finery which she refused to wear at the altar, her fair white shoulders shining through folds of delicate lace, a necklet of pearls—his wedding-gift—encircling her pretty throat, a bunch of pale pink roses loosely hanging from her rough brown hair.
"How fair, how bright, how young you look, my love, my love!" he thinks, with a sort of hungry pain; while her gray eyes meet his with the strange expression they always wear now, half wistful, half defiant, and a little scared as well—an expression which he sometimes feels, with a pang of impotent remorse, that no act, or word, or wish of his can ever chase thence again, even if he labored as manfully as he is now doing to the end of his days.
"Do I like you," he repeats softly—"like you, Addie!" Then, with a quick return to his usual self-possessed, matter-of-fact manner—"Certainly, my dear; your dress is very nice indeed."
"Rapturous commendation!" she answers, with a light vexed laugh.
"Now, Addie, clear away; it is my turn, please. What have you to say to me, Mr. Armstrong?"