I
Mrs. Ascott went out into the garden after breakfast to watch the
transfer of tomato plants from the cold frames beside the garage to
the loamy bed that bordered the west wall. Dutton had explained to her
that nothing would thrive against the high board fence that shut the
grounds from the street, at the east side of the garden--on account of
the afternoon sun--and that these tomatoes would grow six feet high and
would disport their fruit above the stone wall ... if the suckers were
kept picked off. She wondered what suckers were, and how the afternoon
sun had acquired such a sinister reputation.
She had not slept, and the April air was cool and refreshing. Mamma and
the boys were safely installed in a Paris apartment. Papa had closed
the big house at Pelham, taking two of the best trained servants with
him to the city establishment on Riverside Drive, and was happily
engrossed in the Wall Street fight for further millions--secure from
the annoyance of family intrusion. She had several letters and one
cablegram. How remote it all seemed, how like the hazy memory of
another existence! Two months ago she was trying to forget Raoul, his
amiable as well as his maddeningly offensive side. Now she seldom
thought of him at all. His personality had lost its definite line and
mass. Even his form was growing nebulous. She could not remember what
it was that he particularly disliked for breakfast ... and whether he
was growing alarmingly stout or thin when he went away to Egypt with
Hilda Travers.
It was strange that she should have forgotten. Her life with him had
been made up of just such things as these. She searched herself for an
explanation, as the gardener rambled on, his words scarce reaching her
consciousness. Slowly the imponderable thoughts assembled themselves,
fashioning for her a shadow picture of her remote childhood. She was
in the old kitchen at Rochester and her grandmother Holden was baking
cookies for the slum children. There on the marble slab lay the great
mass of yellow dough that so tempted her eager fingers. More than once
she had seized a breathless opportunity, while grandma’s back was
turned, to thrust an index finger far down into its golden softness.
And behold! The mass had come together, leaving scarce a trace of the
deep impression she had made.
Was she as plastic as dough, and had her husband gone from her life
without leaving an impression? There must be something more ...
something that had not worked out with precision in their case. Did
not that same yielding substance take on the fairly permanent shapes
of lions and camels, dancing girls and roosters with arching tails?
Perhaps Raoul had neglected to bake the dough. Was she still an
impressionable girl, for all her tragic experience?