It was strange to think that if, on finishing her coffee in her room,
she had looked in on the children, as she generally did, instead of
going down to the drawing-room to write a note, her whole life might
have been different. "Why didn't I?" was the question she often asked
herself in the succeeding years, only to follow it with the reflection:
"But perhaps it would have happened in any case. Since the fact was
there, I must have come to know it--in the long run."
The note was an unimportant one. She could have sent it by a servant at
any minute of the day. The very needlessness of writing it at once, so
that her husband could post it as he went to his office, gave to the act
something of the force of fate.
Everything that morning, when she came to think of it, had something of
the force of fate. Why, on entering the drawing-room, hadn't she gone
straight to her desk, according to her intention, if it wasn't that fate
intervened? As a matter of fact, she went to the oriel window looking
down into Fifth Avenue, with vague thoughts of the weather. It was one
of those small Scotch corner windows that show you both sides of the
street at once. It was so much the favorite conning-spot of the family
that she advanced to it from habit.
And yet, if she had gone to her desk, that girl might have disappeared
before the lines of the note were penned. As it was, the girl was there,
standing as she had stood on other occasions--three or four, at
least--between the two little iron posts that spaced off the opening for
foot-passengers into the Park. She was looking up at the house in the
way Edith had noticed before--not with the scrutiny of one who wishes to
see, but with the forlorn patience of the unobtrusive creature hoping to
be seen.
In a neat gray suit of the fashion of 1904 and squirrel furs she was the
more unobtrusive because of a background of light snow. She was
pathetically unobtrusive. Not that she seemed poor; she suggested,
rather, some one lost or dazed or partially blotted out. People glanced
at her as they hurried by. There were some who turned and glanced a
second time. She might have been a person with a sorrow--a love-sorrow.
At that thought Edith's heart went out to her in sympathy. She herself
was so happy, with a happiness that had grown more intense each month,
each week, each day, of her six years of married life, that it filled
her imagination with a blissful, pitying pain to think that other women
suffered.
The pity was sincere, and the bliss came from the knowledge of her
security. She felt it wonderful to have such a sense of safety as that
she experienced in gazing across the street at the girl's wistful face.
It was like the overpowering thankfulness with which a man on a rock
looks on while others drown. It wasn't callousness; it was only an
appreciation of mercies. She was genuinely sorry for the girl, if the
girl needed sorrow; but she didn't see what she could do to help her.
It was well known that out in that life of New York--and of the world at
large--there were tempests of passion in which lives were wrecked; but
from them she herself was as surely protected by her husband's love as,
in her warm and well-stored house, she was shielded from hunger and the
storm. She accepted this good fortune meekly and as a special
blessedness; but she couldn't help rejoicing all the more in the
knowledge of her security.
The knowledge of her security gave luxury to the sigh with which she
turned in the course of a few minutes to write her note. The desk stood
under the mirror between the two windows at the end of the small back
drawing-room. The small back drawing-room projected as an ell from the
larger one that crossed the front of the house. She had just reached the
words, "shall have great pleasure in accepting your kind invitation
to--" when she heard her husband's step on the stairs. He was coming up
from his solitary breakfast. She could hear, too, the rustle of the
newspaper in his hand as he ascended, softly and tunelessly whistling.
The sound of that whistling, which generally accompanied his presence
in the house, was more entrancing to her than the trill of nightingales.
The loneliness her fancy ascribed to the girl over by the Park
emphasized her sense of possession. She raised her head and looked into
the mirror. The miracle of it struck her afresh, that the great, strong
man she saw entering the room, with his brown velvet house-jacket and
broad shoulders and splendid head, should be hers. She herself was a
little woman, of soft curves and dimpling smiles and no particular
beauty; and he had stooped, in his strength and tenderness, to make her
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, as she had become. And he had
become bone of _her_ bone and flesh of _her_ flesh. She was no more his
than he was hers. That was the great fact. She was no longer content
with the limited formula, "They twain shall be one flesh"; they twain
had become one spirit and one life.
It was while asserting this to herself, not for the first time, that she
saw him start. He started back from the window--the large central
window--to which he had gone, probably with vague thoughts of the
weather, like herself. It was the manner of his start that chiefly
attracted her attention. After drawing back he peered forward. It was
an absurd thing to think of him; she knew that--of him of all
people!--but one would almost have said that, in his own house, he
shrank from being seen. But there was the fact. There was his
attitude--his tiptoeing--his way of leaning toward the mantelpiece at an
angle from which he could see what was going on in the Park and yet be
protected by the curtain.
Then it came to her, with a flush that made her tingle all over, that
she was spying on him. He thought her in the children's room up-stairs,
when all the while she was watching him in a mirror. Never in her life
had she known such a rush of shame. Bending her head, she scribbled
blindly, "dinner on Tuesday evening the twenty-fourth at--" She was
compelled by an inner force she didn't understand to glance up at the
mirror again, but, to her relief, he had gone.
Later she heard him at the telephone. To avoid all appearance of
listening she went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day. On her
return he was in the hall, dressed for going out. Scanning his face, she
thought he looked suddenly care-worn.
"I've ordered a motor to take me downtown," he explained, as he pulled
on his gloves. He generally took the street-car in Madison Avenue.
"Aren't you well?" she thought it permissible to ask.
"Oh yes; I'm all right."
"Then why--?"