"Maria could never look like this," tying a lace handkerchief about her neck, pulling the soft rings of hair looser about her ears, setting her head on one side, and half shutting her eyes to see the thick and curly lashes.
There was no danger of interruption. Maria was safely lodged in the Water-cure House, and the very idea of Mr. Muller's glossy black shoes and dainty brown umbrella venturing out in the rain made Kitty laugh.
"The dear, good soul is finical as a cat," with the good-natured indulgence of a mother for a child. Suddenly she stopped, stared at herself in the glass. "Why, he is my husband!" she said, speaking to the blushing, blue-robed figure as to another person. Then she hastily unbuttoned, unlooped the pretty dress, threw it off, putting on her usual gray wrapper and knotting her hair more tightly back than ever in a comb. "He has been very good to me—very good to me," her chin trembling a good deal.
Then she went down to meet Doctor McCall, who that moment came into the Book-shop, stopping at the door to take off and shake his oilskin coat.
"It is a wet night," she said, just as though he were a stranger. She did not know what else to say or what he answered as she went about, trimming the lamp, dragging out a chair for him, closing the window curtains. Both McCall and Catharine were ordinary people, accustomed to keep up a good flow of talk on ordinary subjects, the weather or any joke or gossip that was nearest to them. There had been no passages of love or hate between them to account for her forced formality, her trembling and flushing, and urgent almost angry wish to remind him that she was Mr. Muller's affianced wife. She felt this with a new contempt for herself.
As for Doctor McCall, he leaned comfortably back in his arm-chair and dried his legs at the grate filled with red-hot coals, while he listened to the soft rustle of her skirts as she moved noiselessly about him. It is the peculiarity of women like Kitty, to whom Nature has denied the governing power of ideas or great personal beauty or magnetism, such as she gave to Miss Muller, that there is a certain impalpable force and attraction in their most petty actions and words, to which men yield. Miss Muller could have watched Kitty all day dragging chairs and trimming lamps, unmoved farther than to pronounce her little better than an idiot. But Peter, Muller or John McCall could not look at her for five minutes without classing her with Cordelia and Desdemona and all the other sweet fools for whom men have died, and whom the world yet keeps sacred in pathetic memory. Some day too, when Catharine should be a mother—though giving to her older children, little more than to the baby on her breast, soft touches and gentle words—she would bind them to her as no other kind, of mother could do—by such bonds that until they were gray-haired no power should be like hers. Miss Muller neither saw nor foresaw such things. But Doctor McCall did. "If I had had such a mother I should not have been what I am," he thought. It was a curious fancy to have about a young girl. But she seemed to embody all the womanliness that had been lacking in his life. Of course she was nothing to him. She was to be that prig Muller's wife, and he was quite satisfied that she should be. If he married, Maria Muller would be his wife. Yet, oddly enough, he felt to-night, for the first time, the necessity that Maria should know how marriage was barred out from him, and felt, for the first time, too, a maddening anger that it was so barred. However, Doctor McCall was never meant by Nature for a solitary man housed alone with morbid thoughts: he was the stuff out of which useful citizens are made—John Andersons of husbands, doting, gullible fathers.
Remembering the bar in his life, his skeleton, ghost or whatever it was, he was only moved to get up and stretch himself, saying, "I've stayed in Berrytown too long. When you have told me your plan, I'll say good-bye to you, Miss Vogdes, and this old house. I shall be off to-morrow."
Kitty had just caught a moth in the flame of the candle. She carried it to the window. "You will come back soon, of course?" her back still toward him.
"No, I think not. I am neglecting my business. And I, of all men in the world, have least right to loiter about this old house, to look in on its home-life or on you."
Kitty gave him a sharp glance, as though some sudden emergency was clear before her which her tact failed to meet. She was folding the bits of muslin at which she had been sewing in a basket: she finished slowly, put the basket away, and sat down at the table, with her elbow on it and her chin on her hand, her gray eyes suggesting a deeper and unspoken meaning to her words: "But for my plan?"