The last remark revealed one of Wilbur’s new social anxieties which were puzzling to his wife.
“It is a curious convention,” she observed bitterly, “that a woman may be intimate with her husband’s friends, but must not even pretend to know her own unless the husband has indorsed them. The four hundred pounds I have paid to Erard’s bankers has always come from my private fortune.”
“If you put it on that ground,” Wilbur answered airily, and then indulgently, “you have always had your own way, and if you don’t mind the false position—”
Mrs. Wilbur looked at him. Men like Wilbur, endowed with the best intentions and the invaluable qualities which perpetuate a democracy, should know when to refrain in handling women.
“This talk about Mr. Erard is—too vulgar. I shall ask him to luncheon here to-morrow to arrange for his lectures. And I will find an opportunity to withdraw my—my assistance in his work.”
She turned away into the hall. The house was all dark now save for the glimmer of a gas-jet in the lower hall. The warm air, scented by the profuse hot-house flowers, made a peculiar odour that permeated even to the bedchambers. The place seemed tomb-like in its dark expanse of vacant rooms. The suggestion of the tomb made the mistress smile grimly: a tomb that had to be carried on and lived in by the ghosts of the living. And what made the gates of this modern tomb so intangible, so strong to enclose? Nothing, yet everything.
CHAPTER VI
Meanwhile Erard, in company with Molly Parker, whom he had offered to escort around the corner, had gained the silent boulevard. The arc-lights cast circular patches of bluish white on the gravel walks and the frosty lawns before the big houses. The line of electric lamps extended, like a citified milky way, into the indefinite distance of the metropolis, which slept now for a few minutes. Above hung the soft edges of the smoke-pall.
“Ugh!” shivered Erard. “It is beastly empty, this never-ending city of yours. Down one of these straight perpetual streets one might expect to be chased by an army of ghosts. If I saw a man in the distance—”
“You needn’t be afraid,” his companion interrupted lightly. “To be sure, there are a good many ‘hold-ups’ on the streets. A man was almost killed on that corner a month ago, and all he had was seventy-five cents. But if any one comes, I will scream, and you can run to the nearest house for assistance.”