"But it is rather awful when you stop to think of it!"
"Why more awful than if Sam had stuck a knife into the other's ribs or punctured him with a bullet? … I think it is rather more intelligent."
Cairy did not know Renault. "Mrs. Bertram gets everybody," he said. Isabelle felt no inclination to discuss with Cairy her talk about neurasthenia and religion. So their chatter drifted from the people they had seen to Cairy himself, his last play, "which was a rank fizzle," and the plan of the new one. One got on fast and far with Cairy, if one were a woman and felt his charm. By the time they had reached the hotel, he was counselling Isabelle most wisely how she should settle herself in New York. "But why don't you live in the country? in that old village Mrs. Woodyard told me about? The city is nothing but a club, a way-station these days, a sort of Fair, you know, where you come two or three times a year to see your dressmaker and hear the gossip."
"But there's my husband!" Isabelle suggested. "You see his business is here."
"I forgot the husband,—make him change his business. Besides, men like country life."
* * * * *
Isabelle found her husband comfortably settled near a hot radiator, reading a novel. Lane occasionally read novels on a Sunday when there was absolutely nothing else to do. He read them slowly, with a curious interest in the world they depicted, the same kind of interest that he would take in a strange civilization, like that of the Esquimaux, where phenomena would have only an amusing significance. He dropped his glasses when his wife appeared and helped himself to a fresh cigar from the box beside him.
"Have a good time?"
It was the formula that he used for almost every occupation pursued by women. Isabelle, throbbing with her new impressions and ideas, found the question depressing. John was not the person to pour out one's mind to when that mind was in a tumult. He would listen kindly, assent at the wrong place, and yawn at the end. Undoubtedly his life was exciting, but it had no fine shades. He was growing stout, Isabelle perceived, and a little heavy. New York life was not good for him.
"I thought Conny's house and the people so—interesting,"—she used the universal term for a new sensation,—"didn't you?"