"I eat quite enough, my dear," was the usual answer—"quite enough," she would add, firmly, "for any one."
Then Dove would sink back ruefully, and I, pitying my wife—I, rebuked but unabashed and shameless in my gluttony, would pass my plate again.
"Give me," I would say, cheerfully, "a third piece of that excellent, that altogether heavenly cherry-pie, my dear."
It may sound like triumph, but was not—for Letitia Primrose would ignore me utterly. "Have you read," she would ask, sipping a little water from her glass, "New Eden, by Mrs. Lord?"
We still walked mornings to the school-house, still talked together as we walked, but not as formerly—not of the old subjects, which was less to be wondered at, nor yet of new ones with the old eloquence. I felt constrained. There was a new note in Letitia's comments on the way the world was going, though I could not define its pitch. She spoke, I thought, less frankly than of old, but much more carelessly. She seemed more listless in her attitude towards matters that had roused her, heart and soul, in other days. Me she ignored at pleasure; could it be possible, I wondered, that she was determined to renounce the whole round world as well?
It was I who had first resented this alienation, but it was Dove who could not be reconciled to a change so inscrutable and unkind. Time, I argued, was sufficient reason; age, I reminded her, cast strange shadows before its coming; our friend was growing old—perhaps like her father—before her time. But Dove was alarmed: Letitia was pale, she said; her face was wan—there was a drawn look in the lines of the mouth and eyes; even her walk had lost its buoyancy.
"True," I replied, "but even that is not unnatural, my dear. Besides, she eats nothing; she starves herself."
My wife rose suddenly.
"Bertram," she said, earnestly, "you must stop this folly. I have tried my best to tempt her out of it, but I have failed. It is you she is fondest of. It is you who must speak."
"I fear it will do no good," I answered, "but I will try." I have had use for courage in my lifetime, both as doctor and man, but I here confess to a trembling of the heart-strings, a childish faintness, a lily cowardice in these encounters, these trifling domestic sallies and ambuscades. Nor have I strategy; I know but one method of attack, and its sole merit is the little time it wastes.