Steve stared at her in bewilderment. “What the devil difference does it make to you?” he demanded, roughly.
She gave a little scream. “Don’t you dare say such things to me.” Then she began to cry very prettily in a singsong, high-pitched voice. “Monster––nobody loves us––nobody loves us––we can’t have a merry Christmas after all.”
“I shan’t be home for dinner,” Steve added more politely. “Miss Faithful’s absence just now makes things quite rushed––I’ll work until late.”
Beatrice sprang up, letting Monster scramble unheeded to the floor. “Oh, you are trying to punish me!”––pretending mock horror. “Stevuns dear, don’t mind my not going! Plans are plans, you must learn to understand. And I’ll send her a lovely black waist and a plum pudding for her Christmas. Tell her I was laid up with one of my bad heads.... No? You won’t let me fib? Horrid old thing––come and kiss me!... Ah, you never refuse to kiss me, nice cave man with bad manners and muddy shoes, wanting to thump his strong dear fists on my little Chippendale tables––and grow so good and booky all in an instant. Forgets he was ever a bad pirate and robbed everyone until he could buy his Gorgeous Girl. Good-bye, story-book man, don’t let the old funeral frazzle you!”
Steve left the house, undecided whether he was taking things too seriously and ought to apologize for being rude to Beatrice or whether his intuitive impression was correct––that Beatrice was not the sort of person he had imagined but that he, per se, was to blame in the matter.
Steve chose to take a street car to the Faithful house. He shrank from creating the atmosphere of a generous and overbearing magnate whose chauffeur opened the door of his machine and waited for him to step majestically upon terra firma. He felt merely a sympathetic friend, for some reason, as he walked the three blocks from the street car through slush and ice, and realized that Mary Faithful trudged back and forth this same pathway twice a day.
Unexpectedly he met Mary at the door, rather white faced and grayer of eyes than usual, but the same sensible Mary who did not believe in any of the 129 customary agonies of grieving proper, as she afterward told him. The old house had not assumed a funereal air. There were flowers on the tables and the cheery fire crackled in the grate, and even the face of the dead woman seemed more content and optimistic than it had ever been in life.
Steve was not expected to go to the cemetery so he trudged back through the same slush to the street car. A fish-market doorway proved a haven during a long wait. He lounged idly against the doorway as if he were an unemployed person casting about for new fields of endeavour instead of the rushed young Midas whose office phone was ringing incessantly.
He was thinking about Mary Faithful’s pleasant manner, the atmosphere of the old-fashioned house, where there was no effort to be smart or gorgeous or to conceal its shabbiness. He hoped Mary would return to the office within the next few days. He wanted her more than he wanted any one else, but he told himself this was because he was selfish and she was a capable machine. No, that was not it, he decided a moment later as he looked in at the activities of the fish market with passing interest.