“Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking things. But you see now? Thought it might attract her attention, thought something real gorgeous like this might impress money on her. Though I don't know,”—he seemed to grow weary as he told it; “I got her a lot of diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and she thought she'd stolen 'em, and they had to take them away.”
Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.
“But there's nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on trying. And anyhow—a fellow likes to think he's taking his wife something from Paris.”
They passed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony—those things they had bought that afternoon: an opera cloak—a velvet dress—those hats—red silk stockings.
The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop Virginia was softly crying.
“Oh, now that's too bad,” he expostulated clumsily. “Why, look here, Young Lady, I didn't mean you to take it so hard.”
When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And the thing which revealed him—glorified him—was less the grief he gave to it than the way he saw it. “It's the cursed unfairness of it,” he concluded. “When you consider it's all because she did those things—when you think of her bein' bound to 'em for life just because she was too faithful doin' 'em—when you think that now—when I could give her everything these women have got!—she's got to go right on worrying about baking the bread and washing the dishes—did it for me when I was poor—and now with me rich she can't get out of it—and I can't reach her—oh, it's rotten! I tell you it's rotten! Sometimes I can just hear my money laugh at me! Sometimes I get to going round and round in a circle about it till it seems I'm going crazy myself.”
“I think you are a—a noble man,” choked Virginia.
That disconcerted him. “Oh Lord—don't think that. No, Young Lady, don't try to make any plaster saint out of me. My life goes on. I've got to eat, drink and be merry. I'm built that way. But just the same my heart on the inside's pretty sore, Young Lady. I want to tell you that the whole inside of my heart is sore as a boil!”
They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the pause. “There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who aren't well. Such soft, lovely things to wear in your room. Not but what I think these other things are all right. As you say, they may—interest her. But they aren't things she can use just now, and wouldn't you like her to have some of those soft lovely things she could actually wear? They might help most of all. To wake in the morning and find herself in something so beautiful—”