Chapter IX

When she turned into Grand Street at nearly six o’clock she scarcely knew whether it was her own gate through which she passed or whether the house was in its right place or had vanished with the old associations; whether she walked up the wooden steps to a familiar door or floated on air to the portal of a castle in Spain.

Warrener had telephoned that he would not be home before midnight; she received the message with relief, although the name sounded with as much indifference to her as though she heard it for the first time that night.

She sat musing over her dinner, ate a little of it, left the table as soon as she could, and restlessly wandered through the rooms from one to the other, then upstairs to the “den,” where in the dark she threw herself full length on George’s hard leather lounge.

The walk of several miles must have caused these excited feelings, this glow; but she was conscious as well of a kind of suffering agitation. She had walked many miles in her life with no such exhilaration as this.

To natures such as hers, by temperament sluggish, an awakening is dangerous, and means revolution. She never had thought of love—that is, in connection with herself or anyone she knew. The idea that a married woman, a nice one—of course there were bad ones—could care for another man had never occurred to her. The word “love” she had never heard mentioned that she could recall. Men like Warrener do not talk of love; they avoid the word and its chaotic consequences. She had never said “I love you” in her life. Her wooing had consisted of a timid kiss or two, a decorous marriage into whose ceremony the word “love” had slipped unobserved, close to “honor” and “obey.” “Love,” in that sentence, meant that she submitted always with a sort of shame and humiliation to be a wife; “honor,” that neither of them would do anything criminal, of course—how should they? “Obey,” that she would keep house for George. These, had she been capable of pigeonholing her ideas, were the grooves into which she would have slipped her conceptions of wedded life.

It is not strange that a woman with a hostility to the laws of whose mysterious passion she knows nothing should refuse to linger in her thoughts on love when it is so mentally surrounded. Love stories she rarely read; she thought them silly and little less than sane. She couldn’t understand them—once or twice they had given her unhappy, lonely feelings, and she had not sought their pages again.

On the sofa, in the dark, after the first dazzling force of the feeling which suffused her and which she did not understand, she thought of her clothes! She wished she had worn another dress, her new beige and a pair of new boots. As she had nothing but Mrs. Bellamy’s afternoon dress with which to compare her wardrobe, she could not construct in her mind any new costume fitting to such an occasion. Her coquetry had not before been aroused. George did not care what she wore. “You’re all right in anything,” she could hear him say.

No, she didn’t believe she was all right. Mr. McAllister was, though. How elegantly he was dressed! His suit, his cravat, his hat and cane and gloves! She was astonished at the vividness with which his image came to her. He seemed to stand there smiling at her. It made her uneasy to think of him so clearly. George dressed nicer than most men, she had thought, but beside Mr. McAllister—why, he looked—he looked common! The word was growing to be very useful to her.

After a little the effect of the open air and the excitement overcame her reflections. She grew drowsy and fell into a light sleep. Her subjective self, more keen and sensitive than her objective, was released, and she dreamed, for a rare thing, dream after dream. Strange, unrestful visions. Mr. McAllister was wound in and out of them, tangled in their maze. She was trying to run away from him. He was beside her, and she was trying to push him away. Out of the indistinct and broken figures of sleep he became clearly defined—he put his arm about her and kissed her. As Gertrude felt the unwonted and confusing touch on her lips—the confusion of her senses—she sprang up with a cry. There was some one in the room.

“Don’t be scared, Gerty; it’s only me.”

“Oh!” she shuddered. “How you frightened me, George! What did you do it for?”

He turned up the light.

“Why, I couldn’t find you in our room or the spare room, so I came in here. Fell asleep waiting for me, did you?”

He stood there, tired and grimy, his hair mussed, his collar lacking its freshness.

“Well, you frightened me like anything,” she said, petulantly. “What did you do? Did you shake me?”

“No, I didn’t—I kissed you.”

She got up without reply and went past him into the spare room.

Warrener said nothing until his preparations for the night were made, then calling out: “Aren’t you coming to bed, Gertrude?” he went to the spare-room door. It was locked.

Used to little petulant exhibitions of temper whose pricks he had felt with no serious wound, tired out and rendered indifferent by the unremitting brain and nerve tension of his life, Warrener yielded passively, and, going into the other room with a sigh of fatigue, sought his deserted bed.

TO BE CONTINUED.