These reflections have surged up in my brain as I contemplate the
recent case of my acquaintance, Mr. Omicron, and they are preliminary
to a study of that interesting case. Scarce a week ago Omicron was
sitting in the Omicron drawing-room alone with Mrs. Omicron. It was an
average Omicron evening. Omicron is aged thirty-two. He is neither
successful nor unsuccessful, and no human perspicacity can say whether
twenty years hence he will be successful or unsuccessful. But anybody
can see that he is already on the way to be a plain, well-balanced
man. Somewhat earlier than usual he is losing the fanciful capricious
qualities and settling down into the stiff backbone of the nation.
Conversation was not abundant.
Said Mrs. Omicron suddenly, with an ingratiating accent:
"What about that ring that I was to have?"
There was a pause, in which every muscle of the man's body, and
especially the facial muscles, and every secret fibre of his soul,
perceptibly stiffened. And then Omicron answered, curtly, rebuttingly,
reprovingly, snappishly, finishingly:
"I don't know."
And took up his newspaper, whose fragile crackling wall defended him
from attack every bit as well as a screen of twelve-inch
armour-plating.
The subject was dropped.
It had endured about ten seconds. But those ten seconds marked an
epoch in Omicron's career as a husband--and he knew it not. He knew it
not, but the whole of his conjugal future had hung evenly in the
balance during those ten seconds, and then slid slightly but
definitely--to the wrong side.
Of course, there was more in the affair than appeared on the surface.
At dinner the otherwise excellent leg of mutton had proved on cutting
to be most noticeably underdone. Now, it is a monstrous shame that
first-class mutton should be wasted through inefficient cookery; with
third-class mutton the crime might have been deemed less awful.
Moreover, four days previously another excellent dish had been
rendered unfit for masculine consumption by precisely the same
inefficiency or gross negligence, or whatever one likes to call it.
Nor was that all. The coffee had been thin, feeble, uninteresting. The
feminine excuse for this last diabolic iniquity had been that the
kitchen at the last moment had discovered itself to be short of
coffee. An entirely commonplace episode! Yes, but it is out of
commonplace episodes that martyrs are made, and Omicron had been made
a martyr. He, if none else, was fully aware that evening that he was a
martyr. And the woman had selected just that evening to raise the
question of rings, gauds, futile ornamentations! He had said little.
But he had stood for the universal husband, and in Mrs. Omicron he saw
the universal wife.