"Yes!" she exclaimed fervently, "cheap! Oh, so cheap!"
Nevertheless she did not despise him as she might have despised him at the time of their marriage for his sordid soul. During these eight months that she had lived by herself she had come to see more justly the causes of things—she had grown wiser. She held him now less rigidly, less remorselessly, to her own ideal of life. For she had begun to understand that the poison which had eaten him was in the air he had breathed; it was the spirit of the city where he worked, of the country, of the day—the spirit of greed. It presented itself to men in the struggle for existence at every turn of the road, insidiously and honorably disguised as ambition and courage. She saw the man's temptation to strive with his competitors, as they strove for the things which they held desirable. And she had come to realize that to stand firmly against this current of the day demanded a heat of nature, a character that the man she had married and worshipped, had never possessed. He was of his time neither better nor worse than his fellows, with their appetite for pleasure, their pride—that ancient childish pride of man in the consideration and envy of his kind....
"So you have it all, and it's bad enough, God knows. Nell, can you ever really forgive it, forget it, and love me again?"
For answer she leaned toward him and kissed him, understandingly. Now that her heart knew him utterly, with all his cowardice and common failings, she might still love him, even foreseeing the faltering and unideal way of his steps, giving him, like many women, her second love, the love that protects in place of the love that adores. And with that kiss there began for her a new marriage with the man she had seen large in her dreams, the man who had been her hero....
The elms swayed softly in the night wind, brushing across the window by their side. The old house was very still with the subdued calm of age, and man and wife sat there together, without words, looking far beyond them toward the future that was to be theirs.
CHAPTER XXX
The next day and the next went by in the peace of the old house. Now that the event which had so wholly occupied the man's mind since the night when the Glenmore burned had come about; now that he was here in the old place, and had his wife and children once more, he began to consider personally the wreck of his affairs which had been left behind in Chicago. And he began to ask himself whether, after all, it was necessary for him to return to the city and make public his shame at the hearing before the coroner. He was not clear what service to justice or to the dead who had been sacrificed, as much through the corruption of civic government as by his own wrong-doing, his testimony would accomplish. That it would surely ruin him professionally was beyond the shadow of a doubt. He could picture to himself well enough the ferocious glee with which the Thunderer would receive his evidence! Was it necessary to give his wife and his children into the merciless hands of the malicious newspapers?
The evening mail of the second day brought a letter from Wheeler. The coroner's inquest, the lawyer wrote, was likely to drag on for a week or more. The coroner was a Republican, and "had it in for the city administration." He was trying, also, to make all the personal and political capital that he could out of the affair. At present, as Jackson could see from the newspapers, they were engaged in examining minor witnesses,—the servants and employees of the Glenmore, the police and the firemen,—trying to account for the origin of the fire. So the architect could be of no use now, at any rate, and had better stay quietly where he was until the matter took more definite shape. As far as the coroner's inquest was concerned, it was a public farce,—trial by newspaper,—and it would be well to wait and see whether the affair was to reach a responsible court. In the meantime it was understood that he was ill at his summer home. Graves, so Wheeler added, had been in to see him again before he left the city. It was foolish to irritate the contractor and make the matter worse than it was already, etc.
Then Hart opened the bundle of newspapers, and glanced through their padded pages. His eye was caught immediately by an editorial caption:—