As she stood there in her slatternly blouse and tousled hair, brandishing the wetted cigarette between nicotine stained fingers, yet enunciating as she had seldom condescended to do to a fellow creature her ruggedly tender philosophy of life, she looked almost beautiful in the eyes of the man who had awakened from a nightmare into the sober greyness of an actual dawn.
She lit the cigarette with fingers unwontedly trembling, and feverishly drew in the first few puffs.
“Well? What are you going to do?”
Quixtus breathed hard, with parted lips, and stared at the future. It is difficult, after a nightmare madness, to adjust the mind to the sane outlook. But she had moved him to the depths—the depths that through all his madness had remained untroubled.
“You are right, Clementina,” he said at last, in a low voice. “I will share with you this great responsibility.”
She blew out a puff of smoke; “I don’t think it ought to turn our hair white, anyhow,” she said, sitting on the arm of the sofa. “The child’s past teething, so we shan’t have to sit up at nights over ‘Advice to Mothers,’ and our common sense will tell us not to fill her up every day with pâté de foie gras. When she’s ill we’ll send for a doctor, and when we want to do business we’ll send for a lawyer. It strikes me, Ephraim, that having another interest in life besides dead men’s jawbones, will do you a thundering lot of good.”
“Would you like something to do me good?” he asked, with a touch of wistful banter.
Clementina, as she afterwards confessed, felt herself to be on such a sky-high plane of self-abnegation and altruism, that she thrust down, figuratively speaking; angelic arms towards him. Really, the mothering instinct again clamoured. She threw her half-smoked cigarette away and came and, standing over him; clutched his shoulder.
“My good Ephraim,” she said, “I would give anything to see you a happy human being.”
Then, in her abrupt fashion, she sent him out to take the air. That also would do him good. She thrust his hat and stick in his hand.