“You are miserable. I can tell it from the lines in your forehead. And your eyes are hot with fever.”
He spoke impersonally; it was like the soothing hand of the physician to his patient. Simmons was laughing still more hilariously, and his neighbor, the Magnificent Wreck, was laughing with him; those near them were shouting and clapping their hands; they were urging him to do something. To his wife it all seemed silly.
“Does that worry you?” continued Vessinger, following her eyes.
She looked at her husband again with a sudden sense of detachment from him. He was foolish, like a child, and she suspected why he was foolish and drank too much: he wished not to think. She despised his male way of trying to escape from himself. His was the man’s simple, coarse instinct—to drink, to laugh, to forget!
Suddenly he was just a man in black and white, like all the others who had come to her that evening and said words and smiled and danced and gone away. He was just a man, like one-half creation.
“Yes,” she replied steadily to the doctor. “I am miserable. Does it make you happy to know that?”
She did not comprehend what inferences he might draw from the juxtaposition of acts and words.
“In a way, it does,” he answered calmly. “But I shouldn’t let that bother you. Our hostess, good woman, loves a laughing guest, and your husband is colossal. The best of men forget themselves, you know, and on the morrow they are ashamed. A good wife forgives—that is her métier.”
The racket below increased until every one stopped his eating or his talk to find out what made the disturbance. Simmons was rising somewhat unsteadily to his feet. His tie had come undone. His large brown eyes, usually twinkling with gentle kindliness, flashed with the passion of the moment.
“Bravo! Simmons! Bravo! A song!” rose from some of the guests. “Sing your old song, Sim!” one called out. The guests jostled into the dining-room, deserting the terrace, where they had been supping and flirting. There were some among the men who had been at the School of Mines and knew his college fame.