During the remainder of the evening Witherspoon joined not in the conversation, he sat brooding, and when bed-time came, he stood in his accustomed place on the hearth-rug and wound his watch, still appearing to gaze at something far away.
CHAPTER XXIII.
HENRY'S INCONSISTENCY.
Snorting March came as if blown in off the icy lake, and oozy April fell from the clouds. How weary we grow of winter in a cold land, and how loath is winter to permit the coming of spring! May stole in from the south. There came a warm rain, and the next morning strips of green were stretched along the boulevards.
Nature had unrolled double widths of carpet during the night, and at sunset a yellow button lay where the ground had been harsh so long—a dandelion. An old man, in whom this blithe air stirred a recollection of an amative past, sat on a bench in the park, watching the flirtations of thrill-blooded youth, and pale mothers, housed so long with fretful children, turned loose their cares upon the grass. It was a lolling-time, a time to lose one's self in the blue above, or sweetly muse over the green below.
One night a hot wind came, and the nest morning was summer. The horse that had drawn coal during the winter, now hitched to an ice wagon, died in the street. The pavements throbbed, the basement restaurants exhaled a sickening air, and through the grating was blown the cellar's cool and mouldy breath; and the sanitary writer on the editorial page cried out: "Boil your drinking-water!"
It was Witherspoon's custom, during the heated term, to take his wife and his daughter to the seaside, and to return when the weather there became insufferably hot. It was supposed that Henry would go, but when the time came he declared that he had in view a piece of work that most not be neglected. Witherspoon recognized the urgency of no work except his own. "What, you can't go!" he exclaimed. "What do you mean by 'can't go'?"
"I mean simply that it is not convenient for me to get away at this time."
"And is it your scheme now to act entirely upon your own convenience? Can't you sometimes pull far enough away from yourself to forget your own convenience?"