“Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other side; it isn't so steep there.”
There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them on the baby's afghan.
“Your mother won't like your spoiling her pear-tree,” said Marcia, seriously.
“She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard.”
“Miss Hubbard!” repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond derision. “How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!”
Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young man's ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried to make him take the baby. Little by little his compassion adjusted itself to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage. His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise, infused itself into his sense of her.
He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his reverie: Marcia had said something. “I beg your pardon?” he queried.
“Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?”
Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions, had done. “No, I don't,” he answered.
“I was at your church.”