“Yes,” returned Halleck, with whimsical melancholy; “I'm not particularly adapted for it. But I don't know that it would be a very pleasant experience for anybody.”
He paused drearily, and Atherton said, “And how did she actually treat you?”
“I hardly know. I hadn't been at the pains to look them up since the thing happened, and I had been carrying their squalid secret round for a fortnight, and suffering from it as if it were all my own.”
Atherton smiled at the touch of self-characterization.
“When I met her and her husband and her baby to-day,—a family party,—well, she made me ashamed of the melodramatic compassion I had been feeling for her. It seemed that I had been going about unnecessarily, not to say impertinently, haggard with the recollection of her face as I saw it when she opened the door for her blackguard and me that morning. She looked as if nothing unusual had happened at our last meeting. I couldn't brace up all at once: I behaved like a sneak, in view of her serenity.”
“Perhaps nothing unusual had happened,” suggested Atherton.
“No, that theory isn't tenable,” said Halleck. “It was the one fact in the blackguard's favor that she had evidently never seen him in that state before, and didn't know what was the matter. She was wild at first; she wanted to send for a doctor. I think towards the last she began to suspect. But I don't know how she looked then: I couldn't look at her.” He stopped as if still in the presence of the pathetic figure, with its sidelong, drooping head.
Atherton respected his silence a moment before he again suggested, as lightly as before, “Perhaps she is magnanimous.”
“No,” said Halleck, with the effect of having also given that theory consideration. “She's not magnanimous, poor soul. I fancy she is rather a narrow-minded person, with strict limitations in regard to people who think ill—or too well—of her husband.”
“Then perhaps,” said Atherton, with the air of having exhausted conjecture, “she's obtuse.”