“He’s perfectly elegant,” she said to herself; “so handsome and polite.”
She would have suffocated at the Turnbulls’; the same atmosphere that had latterly pervaded all of her own surroundings began to surround the unoffending little house whose porch and front gate were reached.
She nerved herself to look up at Mr. McAllister, and with some assurance met his smiling eyes.
“I’ll go along a little further; there’s a pretty walk over along the old Lackawanna Station.”
CHAPTER IX.
When she turned into Grand Street at nearly six o’clock she scarcely knew whether it was her own gate through which she passed or whether the house was in its right place or had vanished with the old associations; whether she walked up the wooden steps to a familiar door or floated on air to the portal of a castle in Spain.
Warrener had telephoned that he would not be home before midnight; she received the message with relief, although the name sounded with as much indifference to her as though she heard it for the first time that night.
She sat musing over her dinner, ate a little of it, left the table as soon as she could, and restlessly wandered through the rooms from one to the other, then upstairs to the “den,” where in the dark she threw herself full length on George’s hard leather lounge.
The walk of several miles must have caused these excited feelings, this glow; but she was conscious as well of a kind of suffering agitation. She had walked many miles in her life with no such exhilaration as this.
To natures such as hers, by temperament sluggish, an awakening is dangerous, and means revolution. She never had thought of love—that is, in connection with herself or anyone she knew. The idea that a married woman, a nice one—of course there were bad ones—could care for another man had never occurred to her. The word “love” she had never heard mentioned that she could recall. Men like Warrener do not talk of love; they avoid the word and its chaotic consequences. She had never said “I love you” in her life. Her wooing had consisted of a timid kiss or two, a decorous marriage into whose ceremony the word “love” had slipped unobserved, close to “honor” and “obey.” “Love,” in that sentence, meant that she submitted always with a sort of shame and humiliation to be a wife; “honor,” that neither of them would do anything criminal, of course—how should they? “Obey,” that she would keep house for George. These, had she been capable of pigeonholing her ideas, were the grooves into which she would have slipped her conceptions of wedded life.