When Lane went West early in May for his annual inspection trip, Isabelle
moved to the Farm for the season. She was wan and listless. She had talked
of going abroad with Vickers, but had suddenly given up the plan. A box of
books arrived with her, and she announced to Vickers that she meant to read
Italian with him; she must do something to kill the time. But the first
evening when she opened a volume of French plays, she dropped it; books
could not hold her attention any more. All the little details about her
house annoyed her,--nothing went smoothly. The governess must be changed.
Her French was horrible. Marian followed her mother about with great eyes,
fearful of annoying her, yet fascinated. Isabelle exclaimed in sudden
irritation:
"Haven't you anything to do, Molly!" And to Vickers she complained:
"Children nowadays seem perfectly helpless. Unless they are provided with
amusement every minute, they dawdle about, waiting for you to do something
for them. Miss Betterton should make Molly more independent."
And the next day in a fit of compunction she arranged to have a children's
party, sending the motor for some ten-mile-away neighbors.
In her mood she found even Vickers unsatisfactory: "Now you have me here,
cooped up, you don't say a word to me. You are as bad as John. That
portentous silence is a husband's privilege, Vick.... You and I used to
_jaser_ all the time. Other men don't find me dull, anyway. They tell me
things!"
She pouted like a child. Vickers recalled that when she had said something
like this one day at breakfast with John and Cairy present, Lane had lifted
his head from his plate and remarked with a quiet man's irony: "The other
men are specials,--they go on for an occasion. The husband's is a steady
job."
Cairy had laughed immoderately. Isabelle had laughed with him,--"Yes, I
suppose you are all alike; you would slump every morning at breakfast."
This spring Isabelle had grown tired, even of people. "Conny wants to come
next month, and I suppose I must have her. I wanted Margaret, but she has
got to take the little boy up to some place in the country and can't
come.... There's a woman, now," she mused to Vickers, her mind departing on
a train of association with Margaret Pole. "I wonder how she possibly
stands life with that husband of hers. He's getting worse all the time.
Drinks now! Margaret asked me if John could give him something in the
railroad, and John sent him out to a place in the country where he would be
out of harm.... There's marriage for you! Margaret is the most intelligent
woman I know, and full of life if she had only half a chance to express
herself. But everything is ruined by that mistake she made years ago. If I
were she--" Isabelle waved a rebellious hand expressively. "I thought at
one time that she was in love with Rob Falkner,--she saw a lot of him. But
he has gone off to Panama. Margaret won't say a word about him; perhaps she
is in love with him still,--who knows!"
One day she looked up from a book at Vickers, who was at the piano, and
observed casually:--
"Tom is coming up to spend June when he gets back from the South." She
waited for an expected remark, and then added, "If you dislike him as much
as you used to, you had better take that time for Fosdick."
"Do you want me to go?"
"No,--only I thought it might be more comfortable for you--"
"Cairy doesn't make me uncomfortable."
"Oh--well, you needn't worry about me, brother dear!" She blushed and came
across the room to kiss him. "I am well harnessed; I shan't break the
traces--yet."...
It was a summerish day, and at luncheon Isabelle seemed less moody than she
had been since her arrival. "Let's take one of our old long rides,--just
ride anywhere, as we used to," she suggested.
They talked of many things that afternoon, slipping back into the past and
rising again to the present. Vickers, happy in her quieter, gentler mood,
talked of himself, the impressions he had received these months in his own
land.
"What strikes me most," he said, "at least with the people that I see about
you, Belle, is the sharp line between work and play. I see you women all at
play, and I see the men only when they are wearily watching you play or
playing with you. One hears so much about business in America. But with you
people it is as much suppressed as if your husbands and brothers went off
to some other star every day to do their work and came back at night by air
ship to see their families."
"Business is dull," Isabelle explained,--"most men's business. They want to
forget it themselves when they leave the office."
"But it is so much a part of life," Vickers protested, thinking of the
hours and days Lane spent absorbed in affairs that Isabelle hadn't the
curiosity to inquire about.
"Too much over here."
"And not enough."...
On their way home in the cool of the evening, over a hilly road through the
leafing woods, their horses walked close together, and Isabelle, putting an
arm affectionately on her brother's shoulder, mused:--
"One feels so differently different days. Tell me, Vick, what makes the
atmosphere,--the color of life in one's mind? Look over there, along the
river. See all the gray mist and up above on the mountain the purple--and
to-morrow it will be gone! Changing, always changing! It's just so inside
you; the color is changing all the time.... There is the old village. It
doesn't seem to me any longer the place you and I lived in as boy and girl,
the place I was married from."
"It is we who have changed, not Grafton."
"Of course; it's what we have lived through, felt,--and we can't get back!
We can't get back,--that's the sad thing."
"Perhaps it isn't best to get back altogether."
Isabelle gave him a curious glance, and then in a hard tone remarked,
"Sometimes I think, Vick, that in spite of your experience you are the same
soft, sentimental youth you were before it happened."
"Not quite."
"Did you ever regret it, Vick?"
"Yes," he said bravely, "many times; but I am not so sure now that one can
really regret anything that is done out of one's full impulse."
"Well,--that was different," Isabelle remarked vaguely. "Did you ever
consider, Vick, that marriage is an awful problem for a woman,--any woman
who has individuality, who thinks? ... A man takes it easily. If it doesn't
fit, why he hangs it up in the closet, so to speak, and takes it out just
as little as he has to. But a woman,--she must wear it pretty much all of
the time--or give it up altogether. It's unfair to the woman. If she wants
to be loved, and there are precious few women who don't want a man to love
them, don't want that first of all, and her husband hasn't time to bother
with love,--what does she get out of marriage? I know what you are going to
say! John loves me, when he thinks about it, and I have my child, and I am
happily placed, in very comfortable circumstances, and--"
"I wasn't going to say that," Vickers interrupted.
"But," continued Isabelle, with rising intensity, "you know that has
nothing to do with happiness.... One might as well be married to a
hitching-post as to John. Women simply don't count in his life. Sometimes I
wish they did--that he would make me jealous! Give him the railroad and
golf and a man to talk to, and he is perfectly happy.... Where do I come
in?"
"Where do you put yourself in?"
"As housekeeper," she laughed, the mood breaking. "The Johnstons are coming
next week, all eight--or is it nine?--of them. I must go over and see that
the place is opened.... They live like tramps, with one servant, but they
seem very happy. He is awfully good, but dull,--John is a social lion
compared to Steve Johnston. John says he's very clever in his line. And as
for Alice, she always was big, but she's become enormous. I don't suppose
she ever thinks of anything so frivolous as a waist-line."
"I thought she had a beautiful face."
"Vick, I don't believe that you know whether a woman has a figure! You
might write a _Symphonie Colossale_ with Alice and her brood as the theme."
"She is Woman," suggested Vickers.
"Woman!" Isabelle scoffed. "Why is child-bearing considered the
corner-stone of womanhood? Having young? Cows do that. Women are good for
other things,--inspiration, love, perhaps!" She curved her pretty lips at
her brother mockingly....
There were two telegrams at the house. Isabelle, opening the first, read
aloud, "Reach Grafton three thirty, Tuesday. John," and dropped it on the
table. The other she did not read aloud, but telephoned an answer to the
telegraph office. Later she remarked casually, "Tom finds he can get back
earlier; he'll be here by the end of the week."