This afternoon Wilbur had noticed his wife’s carriage caught in the jam of the street below, and he had watched the conversation between her and Erard, and finally their disappearance. At the club he had heard a good deal more about Erard than at his own home. He found that he was considered a source of reliable information about Erard by those few men who were interested enough in the young man to remember him. It irritated Wilbur because, apart from his indifference to Erard, it always chafed him to feel that certain aspects of his wife were outside his comprehension. He even suspected at times that, now they no longer had business interests in common, he bored her. Bored his wife! Thus this afternoon Erard made a very significant figure in the landscape. All the crude instincts of the man from a Michigan farm were stirred. Erard should “get”; no gossip about his home!
Wilbur proceeded in this business about as delicately as he would if he had had a clerk to censure. His wife had been given too free a rein: she must feel that his interests, if not propriety, were to be considered. In this mood he followed his wife into the house, where he found her sitting idly by the west window of her little room. A book had fallen on the seat by her side; she seemed to be brooding over difficult thoughts.
“Ady,” Wilbur’s voice roused her like a roll of thunder, “I saw you talking to Erard this afternoon under the windows of the club, and then take him away with you.”
Mrs. Wilbur opened her eyes and waited. Wilbur fumed. It was like a thunderstorm without the rain,—oppressive, with no hope of after-relief. “When does he get out of here?”
“How should I pretend to know! He is visiting Mrs. Stevans.”
“A man doesn’t want his wife talked about at all the clubs,” he began again in bungling fashion. Mrs. Wilbur’s eyes grew cold.
“You mean?”
“I mean that you have been foolish about that Erard ever since you knew him, by all accounts.”
“Stop!” Mrs. Wilbur raised her hand. “That is quite enough. I am sorry you have been listening to gossip.”
Wilbur was a churchgoing Presbyterian Christian. What he was doing he regarded, not only as manly, but as conscientious. He had no other traditions of conduct in such affairs.