He had sweepingly deemed nearly every other woman a fool. Yet she had simply died for her finery. You couldn’t have a meaner, a more frivolous end. She was only Eve, like all the rest, treasuring her apron of fig leaves. He blamed the inanimate thing of lace and soft wool for everything. He dragged it off the nail and trampled on it.
He went into the garden, at the piteous request of Betty, and played ball. She had on a pink frock, the color of the ragged robins that bloomed in the wood. He would on no account tolerate mourning, but the pitying country woman who was their servant had tied a black ribbon on the child’s flaxen head.
Adeline had made that frock. Adeline had ferreted out the stuff at the village shop and carried it home in triumph, knowing he would be pleased. Adeline! Adeline! He seemed to see her fleet white fingers moving along the seams.
They played ball until bedtime. He sat beside the cot in the dusk, a lonely, bereft man, until the little one, who was mystified and tearful, fell asleep. When he went downstairs the paper was still spread out stiffly on the oak table. He picked it up and read again—the one paragraph on the whole sheet.
“Adeline, wife of James Pray.”
*****
That very night Murphy and I and Carrie Dark were dining in his rooms—that set which had known Adeline, which later on was to know James Pray.
Carrie was sixteen, a little girl in a sweet shop—one of those shops where they put nothing but billows of silk and fondants in the window.
Murphy was middle-aged—with a wide margin. I should have said fifty-five, but he only owned up to forty. That was one of his contemptible tricks; he was just like a woman. The things we love and look for in a woman are contemptible in a man. He was what I should call a pretty chap—all regular features, pink cheeks, and pouting lip. Men disliked him, but he was a tremendous favorite with women. His influence over them was quite uncanny.
Carrie was nervous; she had never been in an Inn before. She evidently considered Murphy, with his stale stories of the aristocracy and his brag about his elder brother’s place in Kerry, very magnificent. She wasn’t a country girl, you see, and consequently lacked the rustic stolidity which sometimes passes for dignity. She caught up the newspaper while she waited for her fish, and when she saw the notice of Adeline’s death she gave a youthful giggle.