The next evening, Bertram Chester had the superb impudence to call. Eleanor was alone in the house that night. She hesitated when 229 the maid brought in his name, then shook herself together and went out to face him.
He met her with an imitation of his old manner, an assumption that his change in employment would make no difference in his social relations with the Tiffanys. What words had she used to let him know her feelings? She could not remember now. But it had come hard; for the unmoral half of her perceptions was noting how big and beautiful he looked, how his blush, as of a stripling facing reproof, became him.
He pleaded, he stormed, he presumed, he passed in and out of sulky moods, he began to defend himself against the silent attack of her look. Why hadn’t he a right to do it? A man should look out for himself. But he’d have stayed and rotted with the old law office if he’d felt that she would take it that way.
“You mean more to me than success!” he said.
“No more of that, please!” she cried. After that cry, she fell into dignified silence as the only defence against the double attack from him and from the half of her that yearned for him. From her silence he himself 230 grew silent until, with a boyish shake of his shoulders—lovable but comically inadequate—he bade her good night.
“You’ll cool off!” he said at the door.
“Good bye,” she responded simply.
“No, it’s good night,” he answered.
She woke next morning with a sense of vacancy in heart and mind. Something was gone. She did nothing for a week but justify herself for calling that something back, or nerve herself to let it go.
On the one hand, her mind told her that he had done the ungrateful, the treasonable thing. It did not matter that he might have done it through mere lack of finer perception. That was part of his intolerability. On the other hand, her heart ran like a shuttle through a web of his smiles, his illuminations, the shiver, as from a weapon suddenly drawn, of his unexpected presence, even his look when he stood at the door to receive her final good bye. The woof of that web was the sense of vacancy in her—the unconquerable feeling that a thing by which she had lived was utterly lost.