A girl was coming toward him down the narrow sidewalk of the maple-lined avenue—a trim, buoyant little figure. Henry Jones noticed her slim, silk-clad ankles as she drew closer. And he saw, too, that she wore neat, high-heeled shoes that were very trig and becoming. He watched the ankles and the shoes as they approached. Henry Jones was an expert on the latest styles of shoes, for he was by profession a shoe clerk. But there was in his appraising regard of this particular pair on this particular morning a look that was not wholly impersonally professional.
As the girl passed him, Henry Jones raised his eyes to her face. She was a very pretty girl, with curving lips and soft, fluffy golden hair blowing low about her ears. He did not remember ever having seen her before, but as he met her eyes he smiled—a frank, friendly, comrady sort of smile he felt it was—and he heard his lips murmuring “Good morning,” as his hand went to his hat.
The girl did not pause, but as she passed he thought he saw that she, too, was smiling. And afterward he remembered vividly that the pink of her cheeks had deepened to a sudden red, and that her long lashes had fallen shyly. Henry Jones threw out his chest still farther and strode forward with a song in his heart.
Six years before this important morning to the Jones family, Martha Lewis had married Henry Jones. At the age of twenty-five—one year Henry’s junior—she had felt herself in a fair way of being laid upon the shelf of perpetual maidenhood, and so she had married the prosaic, plodding Henry, as the only available eligible unattached young man of her acquaintance.
You are not to imagine Martha Lewis as an acrid, designing young female. She was merely a comparatively unattractive girl according to the standards demanded by the young men of Rosewood. Like many other girls of her type, Martha was blessed, in exchange for physical beauty, with a considerable stock of good common sense. Throughout her years of adolescence she had cherished secretly all the usual dreams and romance of young girlhood. Then, realizing gradually that their fulfilment was beyond her, she had put them resolutely away, and at her father’s death, when she was twenty-four, had calmly turned to face the world with the resolution to make the best of existing circumstances.
And so she had married Henry Jones—deliberately, because she wanted to. She was in love with him, of course, just as she knew he was with her. It was not the love of her dreams, but a steadfast, practical, common sense love. Probably it was the better kind, she often told herself; and yet—because she was only human, and especially because she was a woman—there were times when, underneath the prosaic contentment of the daily routine of her married life, she found herself wanting something more. For Henry was neither in looks nor by nature inspiring to the female mind. But he made her a good husband; Martha knew that, and she loved him and was content.
This was Henry Jones’s wife—not the woman he knew—but the real woman, as she was on this summer morning when his soul suddenly expanded.
Martha was in the kitchen preparing the meal when he returned. He pecked her upon the cheek, hastily mumbled something about not feeling well, and going out to get the morning air, and then escaped into the dining-room with his morning paper.
During the meal he sat silent, pretending to read.
“Eat your eggs,” said his wife abruptly.