Several of her friends, after trying her sewing-machine, then still something of a novelty, ordered duplicates. Guy suggested as a joke that she charge the makers a commission.
“The idea of trading on friendship?” Bessie laughed.
“Oh, I don't know,” Guy reflected, more seriously. “How about these boarders, then? That's trading on hospitality.”
It was one of those minute flashes of illumination that, multiplied and collected, become the glow of a new light, the signal of a revolution. The country was full of them in those days. The old codes were melting in the heat of change. Standards were fluid. Personally, it ended in Bessie's selling machines, first in her town, then in neighboring ones.
In the restlessness that youth thinks is aspiration for the ideal, particularly for the ideal love, is a large element of craving for place and interest. After her marriage, at least, Bessie might have had enough of both; but the obvious purpose was too limited to appeal to her. Now two appetites and the four seasons supplied motive enough for industry. There was nothing magnificent in this manifest destiny, but it had the advantage of being imperative and constant. It was no small tax on her acquired delicacy, but it gave less time for hunting symptoms. It did not answer the Whence, Whither, and Why; it pointedly changed the subject. Her work began to carry her out of herself.
“Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my promises!”
She had been thinking just that herself with a sense of injury and imposition; and she was used all her life to having people see everything as she saw it, from her side only. But Guy had just turned over to his few creditors the hole in the ground into which so far most of his work had gone. “Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my plans!” was what she expected him to say. And what he did say and what he didn't, met surprised in her mind and surveyed each other.
“Oh, Guy!” she deprecated, suddenly ashamed. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder why this had been sent on him. With a rush of remorseful sympathy and appreciation, she slipped down beside his chair. “My poor old boy!”
He clung to her like a drowning man—Guy, who, after the first single cry at the blow, had been so self-contained (or self-repressed?) through it all!
She remembered that she had omitted a good many things lately.