“You have no choice,” I murmured.
“But here comes the mail,” she exclaimed, rising suddenly and putting on her hat. “Come! Let’s go and meet it.”
My secret hope sank like a stone into cold depths of resignation.
“All right,” I assented sadly; “but why such eagerness for the mail this morning?”
“Why, I am hoping,” she lilted, “I am hoping, of course, for a letter from Oliver, you idiot!”
BOOK FOUR
CORNELIA AND DIONYSUS
I
ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES
The smooth order of Cornelia’s life was interrupted on New Year’s Eve by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered response to the shock was: “That it should have happened to them!” But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural explanation which I shall give, leading up to the mishap in the order of my own approach.
Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her husband, and to her husband’s friends. I group in this way the people whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are not her husband’s friends, and, second, because her husband has an endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.
As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city, where, on my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all, the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of Cornelia’s lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying buttresses, of quoting Oliver—“Oliver says,” and so forth—as if she were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court. It is a little painful.