CONEWAYS & CO. FAIL
IN BOSTON
XX
"I don't think Justin looks very well," said Dosia that afternoon. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, with her arms spread out half-protectingly over Lois. The latter was only resting; she had been up and around the house now for three or four weeks, and, although she looked unusually fragile, seemed well, if not very strong.
The baby, wrapped in a blue embroidered blanket, with only a round forehead and a small pink nose visible, was of that satisfactory variety entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual possession that communicated a new strength to her. Lois was changed. She had always been beautiful, as a matter of fact, but there was something withheld, mysterious, in her expression, as if she were taking counsel of some half-slumberous force within, as of one listening at a shell for the murmur of the ocean.
Not only Lois, but everything else, seemed changed to Dosia, at the same time being also flatly, unchangeably natural. She had longed—oh, how she had longed!—to be back here. Even while loving and working in her so-called home, she had felt that this was her real home, although here her cruelest blows had fallen on her; even while bleeding with the wrench of
parting from her own flesh and blood, she had felt that this was the real home, for here she had really lived; and it was the home of the nicer, more delicate instincts. After the crude housekeeping, the lack of comforts that made the simplest nursing a grinding struggle with circumstance, it was a blessed relief to get back to a sphere where minor details were all in order as a matter of course. The Alexanders, with their three children, kept only one maid now; but even that restriction did not prevent the unlimited flow of hot and cold water!
Yet she had also dreaded this returning,—how she had dreaded it!—with that old sickening shame which came over her inevitably as she thought of certain people and places and days. The mere thought of seeing Mrs. Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing through fire. One braces one's self to withstand the pain of scenes of joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes, there is little of that dreaded pain. It has been lived through and the climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense, more harrowingly real, than the reality.
Mrs. Leverich stopped her carriage one day to greet Dosia, and to ask her, with a tentative semblance of her old effusion, to come and make her a visit—an effusion which immediately died down into complete non-interest, on Dosia's polite refusal; and the incident was not especially heart-racking at the time, though afterward it set her unaccountably trembling. Mrs. Leverich had in the carriage with her a small, thin, long-nosed man with a pale-reddish mustache and hair, who, gossip said, passed most of his time at the Leverichs'—he was seen out driving alone with Myra nearly every day. He was "an old friend from home." It had been gossip at first, but it was growing to be scandal now, with audible wonder as to how much Mr. Leverich knew about it.
Her avoidance of George Sutton was as nothing to his desire of avoiding her. He dived with surreptitious haste down side streets when he saw her coming, or disappeared within shop doorways. Once, when Dosia confronted him inadvertently on the platform of a car, and he had perforce to take off his hat and murmur, "Good morning," he turned pale and was evidently scared to death. After this he only appeared in the village street guarded on either side by a female Snow—usually Ada and her mother, though occasionally Bertha served as escort instead of the latter. The elder Snows, in spite of this apparent security, were in a state of constant nervous tension over Mr. Sutton's attention to Ada. He had not "spoken" yet, but it had begun to be felt severely of late that he ought to speak. Whenever Ada came into the house, her face was eagerly scanned by both mother and sister to see from its look if it bore any trace of the fateful words having been uttered. Every one knew, though how no one could tell, that that bold thing, Dosia Linden, had tried to get him once, and failed.