“At the door, a few moments ago, I had to stand for a time and ‘drink in’ my ‘art drawing-room softly shaded at midnight.’ This sort of thing was what I’d dreamed of, so long, it—well, it hurt. Even now it hurts. But it’s a sweet hurt. That’s the ‘hick’ in me, I suppose. I can’t get over it.”
Madelaine smiled, a bit sadly. Reaching up, she drew the hand despoiling her hair down beside her cheek and patted it. (Milly would have reminded him curtly that he was “mussing her” or asked him if he thought she could do her hair a dozen times a day just for him to yank out of place—oh, damn Milly!)
“Nathan, dear,” the wife whispered, calm eyes looking deep in the flames, “pride in one’s home—appreciation of the efforts of loved ones to please, is never provincial; neither should a lifelong hunger for beautiful things hurt. I say that, Nathan, and yet you make me confess that you’ve not been alone in that hunger; you haven’t been the only one who has come into a heritage of such things, to know that sweet hurt. And remember too, dear, without earthly shadows we see no high lights. It’s the wealth of life to measure our happiness at last by the price attainment has cost us.”
III
“My Girl the Fairies Brought!” whispered Nathan, after a time. “I never want to think of her as coming from anywhere else. There still are fairies.”
Madelaine arose at the end of a half-hour, despite her husband’s protest.
“I’m only going above stairs to get an envelope, dear. It holds two pieces of brown mapping with a strip of newspaper pasted upon them. I want you to take them to an art store when you go down to the office in the morning. Have the slip of news-print remapped and put in a copper frame. It must hang over my writing desk—permanently.”
“Newsprint? Copper frame? What’s the idea?”
“I want my Rosary out in sight, where I can look upon it constantly.”
She rumpled his hair. Then she leaned over the back of the divan. Her delicate lips were very close. He did.