Up to the time of the ceremony, and for a little while afterward, it had appeared to him as if he were lord and master. She had always seemed so dependent on him, so anxious that he should take her. Why, her very life had been in his hands, as it were, or so he had thought! And now—he tried to think back over the evening and see what it was he had done or said, but he couldn’t remember anything. Everything seemed innocent enough. He couldn’t recall a single thing, and yet——
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied sourly, withdrawing into himself. “I haven’t noticed that I lack dignity so much. I have a right to be cheerful, haven’t I? You seem to be finding a lot that’s wrong with me.”
“Now please don’t get angry, Duer,” she persisted, anxious to apply the corrective measure of her criticism, but willing, at the same time, to use the quickness of his sympathy for her obvious weakness and apparent helplessness to shield herself from him. “I can’t ever tell you anything if you’re going to be angry. You don’t lack dignity generally, honey-bun! You only forget at times. Don’t you know how it is?”
She was cuddling up to him, her voice quavering, her hand stroking his cheek, in a curious effort to combine affection and punishment at the same time. Duer felt nothing but wrath, resentment, discouragement, failure.
“No, I don’t,” he replied crossly. “What did I do? I don’t recall doing anything that was so very much out of the way.”
“It wasn’t that it was so very much, honey; it was just the way you did it. You forget, I know. But it doesn’t look right. It belittles you.”
“What did I do?” he insisted impatiently.
“Why, it wasn’t anything so very much. It was just when you had the pictures of those new sculptures which Mr. Hatton lent you, and you were showing them to Miss Russell. Don’t you remember what you said—how you called her over to you?”
“No,” he answered, having by now completely forgotten. He was thinking that accidentally he might have slipped his arm about Charlotte, or that he might have said something out of the way jestingly about the pictures; but Marjorie could not have heard. He was so careful these days, anyway.
“Why, you said: ‘Hey, Charlotte, you skate! Come over here.’ Now, what a thing to say to a girl! Don’t you see how ugly it sounds, how vulgar? She can’t enjoy that sort of remark, particularly in my presence, do you think? She must know that I can’t like it, that I’d rather you wouldn’t talk that way, particularly here. And if she were the right sort of girl she wouldn’t want you to talk to her at all that way. Don’t you know she wouldn’t? She couldn’t. Now, really, no good woman would, would she?”