If he loved her, she thought, he would not try to convince her with arguments of propriety and religious exhortations. And if he showed that he loved her passionately she would not have the courage to leave him. One expression of longing love would have bound her hand and foot.
He did love her, in his way, as a busy man married nearly four years, who could not devote himself exclusively to sentiments, does love. He admired her, was proud of her fine presence in dress, thought she was a clever woman—indeed the most superb creature of her sex he had ever seen. And he loved domesticity in itself. He had an honest loathing for immorality, and a healthy respect for the home. He hoped for a family of children “to put ahead in the world.” He was prepared to be a good husband and father, and, now! a catastrophe from a clear sky. A man’s pride receives a severe cuff when the handsome woman he has secured, as he thinks, on a life-tenure, shows the world that she is sick of the bargain.
They gave up the subject in sheer exhaustion that night, Mrs. Wilbur agreeing to take no final step without further consideration. As she left the room, her husband said blankly, “You couldn’t have cared much all along!”
She turned with a gleam of irritation.
“It was to be a partnership, wasn’t it? There was too much of that idea. Marriage isn’t a partnership. It’s—”
He waited expectantly.
“I don’t know,” she moaned. “I have done you a wrong, somehow.”
CHAPTER X
The business of the Legal Aid Society had brought Thornton Jennings to know one Peter Erard, an operative in a piano-factory. He lived with his father, a helpless old man, on one of the long traffic streets which pierce the stockyards district. In the section where the Erards lived, the narrow frame cottages were sunk below the level of the street, which seemed to have bestirred itself recently and risen above the squalor of the marsh. Jennings had asked Molly Parker to visit the Erards, when Peter met with an accident at the factory, that ended finally in a fever and a gradual decline. While he was idle Jennings and Miss Parker did what they could for him. They discussed the possibility of Mrs. Wilbur’s inducing Simeon to do something for the old man, at least in the event of Peter’s death. But Miss Parker was afraid of the subject in her friend’s present mood.
The two felt that Peter’s misfortune was more pathetic than showed on the surface. “He yearns for what the other one got,” Jennings said. “He stuck by the old people, and yet he had the call, too.”