She felt the dog's insane desire to tear off this amiability, this cloying gentleness of the newcomer, and find what was beneath. It was just as it used to be long ago when prim, polite little misses came to play with her—white, pink-eyed poodles consorting with a big Newfoundland. She used to feel clumsy and worsted beside them, possessed by the devil too to scare and disgust them. Yet she knew herself more right than they all the time.
When she sat at the head of the dinner-table an hour or two later, soft silken drapery having taken the place of the soft woollen, and her usual calm good temper on the surface instead of pallor and tears, her secret mood was very much the same. Mr. Neckart sat apart from her: he spoke little, and that only to the captain, who was eager about the political question of the day. Judge Rhodes, dropping his voice, poured into her ear eulogiums on Van Ness.
"Did you see him smiling down on that brute? Now, how did he know but he had given him the hydrophobia?"
"I appreciated the self-control," smiling. "So did Bruno. It drove him mad."
"Self-control? I tell you, it's super-human! I've thought sometimes it was a divine power sustaining him. Why, I saw that man at his mother's deathbed. She lay in his arms, and he sang to her—hymns, you know—sang to her in a clear, unbroken voice until her spirit had passed out of hearing. I couldn't have done it, even for a stranger."
"I am sure you could not," said Miss Swendon.
"He sinks self out of sight wholly, you see. Now, he had a dog once—a hound like yours—brought him up. It was touching to see them together—the devotion of the poor brute. Well, he sold him, and gave the hundred dollars to his State Home for Children. He could not afford such a luxury as the dog's love, he said, while these poor wretches needed so much."
"But my dog," said Miss Swendon quite distinctly, "is more to me than all the wretches in Pennsylvania."
There was an awkward silence.
Mr. Van Ness turned his handsome face on her with a benign nod: "How natural and beautiful that is! Her dog and her babe and her lover are more to a woman than all the outside world. So they ought to be! Love is like air: when it is confined it only fills a given space, but give it escape and it spreads over all God's creation. The day is not far distant when young, fair women will freely give themselves to the work of raising the dangerous classes."