“Talk of Protean artists! Vaudeville clamor for me some day—you’ll see! I’ll be five characters in twenty-five minutes, and no one of them Helen Penn!”
And then she looked so altogether exactly the way he liked his wife to look, that he whispered something quite absurdly lover-like to her as he put her into the cab. She laughed in an excited, detached way and made no response in kind, and again his mood changed and a chilly fog of vague suspicion closed in upon him.
At the theater he leaned back in his seat and watched Helen with eyes that began to reinventory her personality, seeking to comprehend this strange exhilaration that had recently uplifted her out of all her environment.
Once, between the second and third acts, Helen asked Robert for a pencil and made a note on the margin of her program, which she laughingly refused to let him read. It was all that was needed to crystallize his resentment, and muttering something about “a whiff of tobacco,” he got up and went to the lobby.
It so happened that Mr. Flagg, the dignified senior member of their successful firm, was strolling about alone with a cigarette, and after greetings between the two Flagg said, in a low tone, to Robert:
“It’s all up with your side of the Perry case! The evidence in rebuttal will knock you higher than Haman. I’ve just got hold of it—I’ll explain in the morning. It seems that your pretty client has been hoodwinking caro sposo for two years—all the time looking like a Botticello angel, all pure soul and sublimated thought, dressed always in shades of gray—pearl gray, Penn!” laughed Flagg; “a dove with the heart of a—— There’s the bell! Come down early to-morrow, there’s work ahead for us all.”
The first thing that Robert did as he sank into his seat was to note the shade of Helen’s gown—it was a dull lead color!
If jealousy is once allowed so much as a finger tip within the portals of a heart, the chances are that within an inconceivably short time he will be in entire possession, sprawled all over the place, yelling for corroboration and drinking it thirstily until madness comes.
Every little unrelated incident in Robert’s home life fell suddenly into place under suspicion’s nimble fingers. Up to that time he had been reasonably sure of the integrity of his hearthstone. Only within those eight weeks had these new symptoms been developing in the conduct of the wife of his bosom, the mother of his little daughter, Betty. Her curiously happy exaltation, her absentmindedness, her long, smiling reveries; the look of flushed excitement on her pretty face, the odd impression of breathlessness; the muttering of strange words in her sleep, followed by bursts of almost ribald laughter. Could it be possible that she was leading a double life, like that other woman?—-a life to which he had no latchkey?
What was that devilish thing in “The Cross of Berny”—from Gautier’s pen, if he remembered rightly, among those four royal collaborateurs—“To call a woman—my wife! What revolting indiscretion! To call children——” But the thought of little Betty hushed even his mad imaginings.