Wanning unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not take it off. He stood folding his muffler slowly and carefully. What he did not understand was, how he could go while other people stayed. Sam would be moving about the table like this, Mrs. Wanning and her daughters would be dressing upstairs, when he would not be coming home to dinner any more; when he would not, indeed, be dining anywhere.
Sam, coming to turn on the parlor lights, saw Wanning and stepped behind him to take his coat.
“Good evening, Mr. Wanning, sah, excuse me. You entahed so quietly, sah, I didn’t heah you.”
The master of the house slipped out of his coat and went languidly upstairs.
He tapped at the door of his wife’s room, which stood ajar.
“Come in, Paul,” she called from her dressing table.
She was seated, in a violet dressing gown, giving the last touches to her coiffure, both arms lifted. They were firm and white, like her neck and shoulders. She was a handsome woman of fifty-five,—still a woman, not an old person, Wanning told himself, as he kissed her cheek. She was heavy in figure, to be sure, but she had kept, on the whole, presentable outlines. Her complexion was good, and she wore less false hair than either of her daughters.
Wanning himself was five years older, but his sandy hair did not show the gray in it, and since his mustache had begun to grow white he kept it clipped so short that it was unobtrusive. His fresh skin made him look younger than he was. Not long ago he had overheard the stenographers in his law office discussing the ages of their employers. They had put him down at fifty, agreeing that his two partners must be considerably older than he—which was not the case. Wanning had an especially kindly feeling for the little new girl, a copyist, who had exclaimed that “Mr. Wanning couldn’t be fifty; he seemed so boyish!”
Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the mirror.
“Well, did you tell the girls, Julia?” he asked, trying to speak casually.