In some men the business faculties become more and more self-sufficing when there is no other passion to divide them—the nature grows all one way; and there are others who seem independent, yet who are always as dependent as children on the unnoticed, sustaining help of affectionate love that makes the home a refuge from the provoking of all men; that unreasonably, and at all times, hotly champions the cause of the beloved against the world. No help-giving virtue had gone out from this household in the last year; it had all been a dead lift.
Justin had never spoken of his affairs to Lois since that Sunday when she had said that she hated them. When she had asked for money, she had always added the proviso, "if he could afford it," and accepted the fact either way without comment. He was, as time went on, more and more affectionately solicitous for her welfare, even if he was, as she keenly felt, less personally loving.
If she went to bed early in the evening, he took that opportunity to go out; and if she stayed up, he remained at home and went to sleep on the lounge, and the little touch that binds divergence with the inner thread of sympathy was lacking.
Yet, strange as it might seem, while she consciously suffered far the most, his loss was mysteriously the greater; the fire of love of which she was by right high priestess still burned secretly for her tending as she covered over the embers on the hearthstone, though he was cold and chill for lack of that vital warmth.
There were moments when she felt that she could die gladly for him, but always for that glory of self-triumphing in the end. Then that which seemed as if it could never change began to change.
Before the child was born, and now since that, there was a difference. Men and women who suffer most from imaginary wrongs may become sane and heroic in times of real danger. Lois, noble, sweet, and brave, thoughtful for Zaidee and Redge and Justin even while she trembled, excited reverence and a deep and anxious tenderness in her husband.
Then, afterward, he was proud of his second son. When Justin came in at the end of each day and sat down by her bedside, holding her blue-veined hand while she smiled peacefully at him, there was a sweet, sufficing pleasure about those few minutes, singularly soothing, though the interim had no relation to actual living, except in the fact that one anxiety had been lifted. While the expectant birth of the child had been to her, as it is to almost every woman, a separate and distinct calamitous illness to which she looked forward as one might look forward to being taken with typhoid or diphtheria, he considered it as a manifestation of nature, not in itself dangerous, and her fear that of a child, to be soothed by reason.
Still, he had had his moments of a reluctant, twinging fear. One cause for disquieting thought was removed. Now the helplessness of this little family, for whom he was the provider, tugged at a swelling heart.
As he walked toward his office to-day somewhat later than was his wont, he diverged from his usual custom: instead of entering his own doorway, he went across the street to Cater's after a moment's hesitation. Now that Cater's coöperation was at the consummating point, it was wiser not to run the risk of its sagging back. Leverich and Martin were keenly for its success. Justin's credit would rise immeasurably with it. The Typometer Company had absorbed the minor machines with so little trouble that the unabsorbability of the timoscript had seemed an unnecessary stumbling-block. Time and time again Justin had sought Cater with tabulated figures and unanswerable arguments. The combination, he firmly believed, would be highly beneficial for both. The field was, in its way, too narrow to be divided with the highest profit; together they could command the trade.
