“Death’s a better game than bridge—you have no partner to help you!” she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a chair of torture and indignity; when before they would give her the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.
John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb—ten good pounds he weighed at birth—and he was gay of eye when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and become a man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him, because he saw that this miniscule aristocrat, this child born to the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him.
Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian emigrés.
III
For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was glowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the tablecloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious “Darling—do you mind—just a second— Plinder, isn’t there any more of the sherry?”
When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his enthusiasm was gone.
She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.
Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on the mutation of bacterial species—very beautiful, very delicate—and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.
He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her. Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements, to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about science, to forget even her and the baby.
“I’ve got to work evenings!” he said. “I can’t be regular and easy about it when I’m caught by a big experiment, any more than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were gestating the baby.”