‘What is wrong with you?’ he asked, in bewilderment.
‘Don’t you see,’ she replied, with a broken voice, ‘I flirted all day with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy. You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do!’
‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘it was not right of you. People might say, “Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be!” To be sure, I wouldn’t be furious a bit; but then they’d go about saying I was. It would not matter, of course; but you know it is not right of you.’
‘It is no use pretending you have feeling. It is all that miserable little town you come from, with its sleepy old shops and its sleepy old society. I would give up loving you this minute,’ she added, with a caressing look, ‘if you had not that beautiful bronzed face. I will improve you. To-morrow evening you must come to the opera.’ Suddenly she changed the subject. ‘Do you see that little fat man coming out of the Square and staring at me? I was engaged to him once. Look at the four old ladies behind him, shaking their bonnets at me. Each has some story about me, and it will be all the same in a hundred years.’
After this he had hardly a moment’s peace. She kept him continually going to theatres, operas, parties. These last were an especial trouble; for it was her wont to gather about her an admiring circle to listen to her extravagancies, and he was no longer at the age when we enjoy audacity for its own sake.
VIII
Gradually those bright eyes of his imagination, watching him from letters and from among the fourteen flies on the ceiling, had ceased to be centres of peace. They seemed like two whirlpools, wherein the order and quiet of his life were absorbed hourly and daily.
He still thought sometimes of the country house of his dreams and of the garden and the three gardeners, but somehow they had lost half their charm.
He had written to Howard and some others, and commenced, at last, a letter to Mary Carton. It lay unfinished on his desk; a thin coating of dust was gathering upon it.
Mrs. Leland called continually on Mrs. Sherman. She sentimentalized over the lovers, and even wept over them; each visit supplied the household with conversation for a week.