“Because you think only of yourself and of what you wish,” she surprised him by answering. “Why not think of the other chap occasionally?”
He paused in the lighting of his pipe. “Oh––you mean my coming here.” He looked like an unjustly punished child without redress. “You mean to consign me to the gloom of the grill room or one of those slippery leather chairs in a far corner of the club? Come, you can’t say that. I won’t listen if you do. I just want to be friends with someone.”
With unsuspected coquetry she suggested: “Why not your wife?”
“We’re not friends––merely married.” He lit his pipe and flipped the match away. “Cheap to say, isn’t it? Don’t look at me like that; you make me quite conscience-stricken. You seem to be aiming at me as directly as a small boy aims his snowball. Why?”
“It wouldn’t do the slightest good to tell you what I think.”
“Yes, it would; someone must tell me. I’ve never been as lonesome in my life as now––when I’m a rich man and the husband of a very lovely woman. It sort of chills me to the marrow at first thought. I’ve been in a delirium, quite irresponsible. These last few months I’ve been coming down to earth. Only instead of getting my feet planted firmly on the sod 166 I think I’ve struck a quicksand bed. I say, lend us a hand.”
“Why ask me?”
“I don’t just know. I don’t think I shall ever be quite so sure of anything again. After all, a person has just so much capacity for joy and sorrow, and so much energy, and so much will power, allotted at birth; and if he chooses to go burn it all up in one fell swoop doing one thing––he is at liberty to do so; but he is not given any second helping. Isn’t that true? Quite a terrible thing to realize when you know you used up your joy allotment in anticipation––and it has been so much keener and finer than any of the realization. And all my energy went into making money the easiest way I could; but it does not pay.”
Mary clasped her hands tightly in her lap; she was afraid to let him see her joy at the long-awaited confession.
“Yet you ask me, a reliable machine, to help you in your perplexities?”