"I will tell him so some day, whether he likes it or not."
"No, you mustn't; for it isn't true. He's just as much an artist in his
way as I am in mine, and, so far as the public is concerned, he has
given more proofs."
"Oh, _his_ public!"
"It won't do to despise any public, even the theatre-going public."
Maxwell added the last words with a faint sigh.
"It's always second-rate," said his wife, passionately. "Third-rate,
fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were
writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be really
addressing refined people."
"It kills me to have you say that, Louise."
"Well, I won't. But don't you see, then, that you must stand up for art
all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will
refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I
can't endure to have you even seem to give way to Godolphin."
"You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He's far more
manageable than I expected him to be. It's quite pathetic how docile he
is, how perfectly ductile! But it won't do to browbeat him when he comes
over here a little out of shape. He's a curious creature," Maxwell went
on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with
difficulty. "I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could
he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to
perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin's mind is for
the serious drama." Maxwell laughed. "All his artistic instincts are in
solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate
them, or to give them any positive character. He's like a woman!"
"Thank you," said Mrs. Maxwell.
"Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness
of a woman."
"Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said
about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you."
"Oh, I don't believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went
out."
Mrs. Maxwell sighed. "Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient,
you are good. You are better than I am."
"I don't see the sequence exactly," said Maxwell.
They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious
thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach
him with an equal inconsequence. "I don't know whether I could write a
novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It
stands on its own feet. It doesn't have to be pushed along, or pulled
along, as the novel does."
"Yes, of course, it's grand. That's the reason I can't bear to have you
do anything unworthy of it."
"I know, Louise," he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak
for a little while.
He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a
sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really
were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play.
But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity
of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every
kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've
known what it is to kill."
"I felt once as if I had killed _you_," she said, and then he knew that
she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual
fascination for them both. "But I never hated you."
"No; I did the hating," he returned, lightly.
"Ah, don't say so, dear," she entreated, half in earnest.
"Well, have it all to yourself, then," he said; and he rose and went
indoors, and lighted the lamp, and she saw him get out the manuscript of
his play, while she sat still, recalling the time when she had tried to
dismiss him from her thoughts upon a theory of his unworthiness. He had
not yet spoken of love to her then, but she felt as if she had refused
to listen to him, and her remorse kept his image before her in an
attitude of pathetic entreaty for at least a hearing. She knew that she
had given him reason, if she had not given him courage, to believe that
she cared for him; but he was too proud to renew the tacit approaches
from which she had so abruptly retreated, and she had to invite them
from him.
When she began to do this with the arts so imperceptible to the
single-mindedness of a man, she was not yet sure whether she could
endure to live with him or not; she was merely sure that she could not
live without him, or, to be more specific, without his genius, which she
believed no one else appreciated as she did. She believed that she
understood his character better than any one else, and would know how to
supplement it with her own. She had no ambition herself, but she could
lend him a more telescopic vision in his, and keep his aims high, if his
self-concentration ever made him short-sighted. He would write plays
because he could not help it, but she would inspire him to write them
with the lofty sense of duty she would have felt in writing them if she
had his gifts.
She was as happy in their engagement and as unhappy as girls usually are
during their courtship. It is the convention to regard those days as
very joyous, but probably no woman who was honest about the fact would
say that they were so from her own experience. Louise found them full of
excitement and an interest from which she relaxed at times with such a
sense of having strained forward to their end that she had a cold
reluctance from Maxwell, and though she never dreamed of giving him up
again, she sometimes wished she had never seen him. She was eager to
have it all over, and be married and out of the way, for one thing
because she knew that Maxwell could never be assimilated to her
circumstance, and she should have no rest till she was assimilated to
his. When it came to the dinners and lunches, which the Hilary kinship
and friendship made in honor of her engagement, she found that Maxwell
actually thought she could make excuse of his work to go without him,
and she had to be painfully explicit before she could persuade him that
this would not do at all. He was not timid about meeting her friends, as
he might very well have been; but, in comparison with his work, he
apparently held them of little moment, and at last he yielded to her
wishes rather than her reasons. He made no pretence of liking those
people, but he gave them no more offence than might have been expected.
Among the Hilary cousins there were several clever women, who enjoyed
the quality of Maxwell's somewhat cold, sarcastic humor, and there were
several men who recognized his ability, though none of them liked him
any better than he liked them. He had a way of regarding them all at
first as of no interest, and then, if something kindled his imagination
from them, of showing a sudden technical curiosity, which made the
ladies, at least, feel as if he were dealing with them as so much
material. They professed to think that it was only a question of time
when they should all reappear in dramatic form, unless Louise should
detect them in the manuscript before they were put upon the stage and
forbid his using them. If it were to be done before marriage they were
not sure that she would do it, or could do it, for it was plain to be
seen that she was perfectly infatuated with him. The faults they found
in him were those of manner mostly, and they perceived that these were
such as passion might forgive to his other qualities. There were some
who said that they envied her for being so much in love with him, but
these were not many; and some did not find him good-looking, or see what
could have taken her with him.
Maxwell showed himself ignorant of the observances in every way, and if
Louise had not rather loved him the more for what he made her suffer
because of them, she must certainly have given him up at times. He had
never, to her thinking, known how to put a note properly on paper; his
letters were perfectly fascinating, but they lacked a final charm in
being often written on one side of half-sheets, and numbered in the
upper right-hand corner, like printer's copy. She had to tell him that
he must bring his mother to call upon her; and then he was so long
doing it that Louise imagined a timidity in his mother which he was too
proud to own, and made her own mother go with her to see Mrs. Maxwell in
the house which she partly let out in lodgings on a very modest street.
It really did not matter about any of those things though, and she and
Maxwell's mother got on very well after the first plunge, though the
country doctor's widow was distinctly a country person, with the narrow
social horizons of a villager whose knowledge of the city was confined
to the compass of her courageous ventures in it.
To her own mother Louise feigned to see nothing repulsive in the
humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had
been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and
tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented
acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell's.
Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she
was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs.
Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she did
not rub it into Louise, which would have done no good, she did rub it
into Louise's father, though that could hardly have been said to do any
good either. Her report of the whole affair made him writhe, but when
she had made him writhe enough she began to admit some extenuating
circumstances. If Mrs. Maxwell was a country person, she was not
foolish. She did not chant, in a vain attempt to be genteel in her
speech; she did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary's graciousness, and
she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully
managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was
any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs.
Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to
herself as any overweening pride she might have had in her son's choice.
Mrs. Hilary did not like her daughter's choice, but she had at last
reached such resignation concerning it as the friends of a hopeless
invalid may feel when the worst comes. She had tried to stop the affair
when there was some hope or some use in trying, and now she determined
to make the best of it. The worst was that Maxwell was undoubtedly of
different origin and breeding, and he would always, in society, subject
Louise to a consciousness of his difference if he did nothing more. But
when you had said this, you seemed to have said all there was to say
against him. The more the Hilarys learned about the young fellow the
more reason they had to respect him. His life, on its level, was
blameless. Every one who knew him spoke well of him, and those who knew
him best spoke enthusiastically; he had believers in his talent and in
his character. In a society so barometrical as ours, even in a city
where it was the least barometrical, the obstacles to the acceptance of
Maxwell were mainly subjective. They were formed not so much of what
people would say as of what Mrs. Hilary felt they had a right to say,
and, in view of the necessities of the case, she found herself realizing
that if they did not say anything to her it would be much as if they had
not said anything at all. She dealt with the fact before her frankly,
and in the duties which it laid upon her she began to like Maxwell
before Hilary did. Not that Hilary disliked him, but there was something
in the young fellow taking his daughter away from him, in that cool
matter-of-fact way, as if it were quite in the course of nature that he
should, instead of being abashed and overwhelmed by his good fortune,
which left Hilary with a misgiving lest he might realize it less and
less as time went on.
Hilary had no definite ambition for her in marriage, but his vague
dreams for her were not of a young man who meant to leave off being a
newspaper writer to become a writer of plays. He instinctively wished
her to be of his own order of things; and it had pleased him when he
heard from his wife's report that Louise had seen the folly of her fancy
for the young journalist whom a series of accidents had involved with
their lives, and had decided to give him up. When the girl decided
again, more tacitly, that she could not give him up, Hilary submitted,
as he would have submitted to anything she wished. To his simple
idolatry of her she was too good for anything on earth, and if he were
to lose her, he found that after all he had no great choice in the
matter. As soon as her marriage appeared inevitable, he agreed with his
wife that their daughter must never have any unhappiness of their
making; and they let her reverse without a word the purpose of going to
spend the winter abroad which they had formed at her wish when she
renounced Maxwell.
All this was still recent in point of time, and though marriage had
remanded it to an infinite distance apparently with the young people, it
had not yet taken away the importance or the charm of the facts and the
feelings that had seemed the whole of life before marriage. When Louise
turned from her retrospect she went in through the window that opened on
the veranda and stood beside her husband, where he sat with his
manuscript before him, frowning at it in the lamplight that made her
blink a little after the dark outside. She put her hand on his head, and
carried it down his cheek over his mouth, so that he might kiss its
palm.
"Going to work much longer, little man?" she asked, and she kissed the
top of his head in her turn. It always amused her to find how smooth and
soft his hair was. He flung his pen away and threw himself back in his
chair. "Oh, it's that infernal love business!" he said.
She sat down and let her hands fall on her lap. "Why, what makes it so
hard?"
"Oh, I don't know. But it seems as if I were _fighting_ it, as the
actors say, all the way. It doesn't go of itself at all. It's forced,
from the beginning."
"Why do you have it in, then?"
"I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has
to be in every life. Godolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him
about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn't
do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of
love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish
there hadn't. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded
fools don't know what to do with their love."
"They might get married with it," Louise suggested.
"I don't believe they have sense enough to think of that," said her
husband. "The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to
imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with
all his might."
Louise laughed out her secure delight. "If the public could only know
why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the
play."
Maxwell laughed, too. "Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like
that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday
edition of the _Events_!"
Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell's acquaintance, who stood to Louise for
all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. "Don't!" she
shrieked.
Maxwell went on. "He would have both our portraits in, and your father's
and mother's, and my mother's; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue,
and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of
art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly
gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it." He
laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.
"I know what you're thinking of now," said his wife.
"What?"
"Whether you couldn't use _our_ affair in the play?"
"You're a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn't do."
"Stuff! It _will_ do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I
shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the
cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on
the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your
succeeding on lines that had never been tried before."
"Generous girl!" He bent over--he had not to bend far--and kissed her.
Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in
his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: "I
could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I'll just take
a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually
reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a
howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I
have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't
matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in
love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at
least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be
vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again."
"That's what I did," said his wife, "and you hadn't offered yourself
either."
Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. "You
wouldn't like me to use that point, then?"
"What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world
knew it."
"Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it
could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work
farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just
take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her
all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts
of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out
about her father's crime, and then--" He stopped again with a certain
air of distaste.
"That would be rather romantic, wouldn't it?" his wife asked.
"That was what I was thinking," he answered. "It would be confoundedly
romantic."
"Well, I'll tell you," said Louise; "you could have them squabbling all
the way through, and doing hateful things to one another."
"That would give it the cast of comedy."
"Well?"
"And that wouldn't do either."
"Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation
in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!"
"Oh yes, I know that--"
"And it would be very effective to leave the impression of their
happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on
their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal of your Haxard
death-scene."
"Godolphin wouldn't stand that. He wants the gloom of Haxard's death to
remain in unrelieved inkiness at the end. He wants the people to go
away thinking of Godolphin, and how well he did the last gasp. He
wouldn't stand any love business there. He would rather not have any in
the play."
"Very well, if you're going to be a slave to Godolphin--"
"I'm not going to be a slave to Godolphin, and if I can see my way to
make the right use of such a passage at the close I'll do it even if it
kills the play or Godolphin."
"Now you're shouting," said Louise. She liked to use a bit of slang when
it was perfectly safe--as in very good company, or among those she
loved; at other times she scrupulously shunned it.
"But I can do it somehow," Maxwell mused aloud. "Now I have the right
idea, I can make it take any shape or color I want. It's magnificent!"
"And who thought of it?" she demanded.
"Who? Why, _I_ thought of it myself."
"Oh, you little wretch!" she cried, in utter fondness, and she ran at
him and drove him into a corner. "Now, say that again and I'll tickle
you."
"No, no, no!" he laughed, and he fought away the pokes and thrusts she
was aiming at him. "We both thought of it together. It was mind
transference!"
She dropped her hands with an instant interest in the psychological
phenomena. "Wasn't it strange? Or, no, it wasn't, either! If our lives
are so united in everything, the wonder is that we don't think more
things and say more things together. But now I want you to own, Brice,
that I was the first to speak about your using our situation!"
"Yes, you were, and I was the first to think of it. But that's perfectly
natural. You always speak of things before you think, and I always think
of things before I speak."
"Well, I don't care," said Louise, by no means displeased with the
formulation. "I shall always say it was perfectly miraculous. And I want
you to give me credit for letting you have the idea after you had
thought of it."
"Yes, there's nothing mean about you, Louise, as Pinney would say. By
Jove, I'll bring Pinney in! I'll have Pinney interview Haxard concerning
Greenshaw's disappearance."
"Very well, then, if you bring Pinney in, you will leave me out," said
Louise. "I won't be in the same play with Pinney."
"Well, I won't bring Pinney in, then," said Maxwell. "I prefer you to
Pinney--in a play. But I have got to have in an interviewer. It will be
splendid on the stage, and I'll be the first to have him." He went and
sat down at his table.
"You're not going to work any more to-night!" his wife protested.
"No, just jot down a note or two, to clinch that idea of ours in the
right shape." He dashed off a few lines with pencil in his play at
several points, and then he said: "There! I guess I shall get some bones
into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it." He
looked up and met his wife's adoring eyes.
"You're wonderful, Brice!" she said.
"Well, don't tell me so," he returned, "or it might spoil me. Now I
wouldn't tell you how good you were, on any account."
"Oh yes, do, dearest!" she entreated, and a mist came into her eyes. "I
don't think you praise me enough."
"How much ought I to praise you?"
"You ought to say that you think I'll never be a hinderance to you."
"Let me see," he said, and he pretended to reflect. "How would it do to
say that if I ever come to anything worth while, it'll be because you
made me?"
"Oh, Brice! But would it be true?" She dropped on her knees at his side.
"Well, I don't know. Let's hope it would," and with these words he
laughed again and put his arms round her. Presently she felt his arm
relax, and she knew that he had ceased to think about her and was
thinking about his play again.
She pulled away, and "Well?" she asked.
He laughed at being found out so instantly. "That was a mighty good
thing your father said when you went to tell him of our engagement."
"It was _very_ good. But if you think I'm going to let you use _that_
you're very much mistaken. No, Brice! Don't you touch papa. He wouldn't
like it; he wouldn't understand it. Why, what a perfect cormorant you
are!"
They laughed over his voracity, and he promised it should be held in
check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked
so effectively into the play.
The next morning Louise said to her husband: "I can see, Brice, that you
are full of the notion of changing that love business, and if I stay
round I shall simply bother. I'm going down to lunch with papa and
mamma, and get back here in the afternoon, just in time to madden
Godolphin with my meddling."
She caught the first train after breakfast, and in fifteen minutes she
was at Beverly Farms. She walked over to her father's cottage, where she
found him smoking his cigar on the veranda.
He was alone; he said her mother had gone to Boston for the day; and he
asked: "Did you walk from the station? Why didn't you come back in the
carriage? It had just been there with your mother."
"I didn't see it. Besides, I might not have taken it if I had. As the
wife of a struggling young playwright, I should have probably thought it
unbecoming to drive. But the struggle is practically over, you'll be
happy to know."
"What? Has he given it up?" asked her father.
"Given it up! He's just got a new light on his love business!"
"I thought his love business had gone pretty well with him," said
Hilary, with a lingering grudge in his humor.
"This is another love business!" Louise exclaimed. "The love business in
the play. Brice has always been so disgusted with it that he hasn't
known what to do. But last night we thought it out together, and I've
left him this morning getting his hero and heroine to stand on their
legs without being held up. Do you want to know about it?"
"I think I can get on without," said Hilary.
Louise laughed joyously. "Well, you wouldn't understand what a triumph
it was if I told you. I suppose, papa, you've no idea how Philistine you
are. But you're nothing to mamma!"
"I dare say," said Hilary, sulkily. But she looked at him with eyes
beaming with gayety, and he could see that she was happy, and he was
glad at heart. "When does Maxwell expect to have his play done?" he
relented so far as to ask.
"Why, it's done now, and has been for a month, in one sense, and it
isn't done at all in another. He has to keep working it over, and he has
to keep fighting Godolphin's inspirations. He comes over from Manchester
with a fresh lot every afternoon."
"I dare say Maxwell will be able to hold his own," said Hilary, but not
so much proudly as dolefully.
She knew he was braving it out about the theatre, and that secretly he
thought it undignified, and even disreputable, to be connected with it,
or to be in such close relations with an actor as Maxwell seemed to be
with this fellow who talked of taking his play. Hilary could go back
very easily to the time in Boston when the theatres were not allowed
open on Saturday night, lest they should profane the approaching
Sabbath, and when you would no more have seen an actor in society than
an elephant. He had not yet got used to meeting them, and he always felt
his difference, though he considered himself a very liberal man, and was
fond of the theatre--from the front.
He asked now, "What sort of chap is he, really?" meaning Godolphin, and
Louise did her best to reassure him. She told him Godolphin was young
and enthusiastic; and he had an ideal of the drama; and he believed in
Brice; and he had been two seasons with Booth and Barrett; and now he
had made his way on the Pacific Coast, and wanted a play that he could
take the road with. She parroted those phrases, which made her father's
flesh creep, and she laughed when she saw it creeping, for sympathy; her
own had crept first.
"Well," he said, at last, "he won't expect you and Maxwell to take the
road too with it?"
"Oh no, we shall only be with him in New York. He won't put the play on
there first; they usually try a new play in the country."
"Oh, do they?" said Hilary, with a sense that his daughter's knowledge
of the fact was disgraceful to her.
"Yes. Shall I tell you what they call that? Trying it on a dog!" she
shrieked, and Hilary had to laugh, too. "It's dreadful," she went on.
"Then, if it doesn't kill the dog, Godolphin will bring it to New York,
and put it on for a run--a week or a month--as long as his money holds
out. If he believes in it, he'll fight it." Her father looked at her for
explanation, and she said, with a gleeful perception of his suffering,
"He'll keep it on if he has to play to paper every night. That is, to
free tickets."
"Oh!" said Hilary. "And are you to be there the whole time with him?"
"Why, not necessarily. But Brice will have to be there for the
rehearsals; and if we are going to live in New York--"
Hilary sighed. "I wish Maxwell was going on with his newspaper work; I
might be of use to him in that line, if he were looking forward to an
interest in a newspaper; but I couldn't buy him a theatre, you know."
Louise laughed. "He wouldn't let you buy him anything, papa; Brice is
awfully proud. Now, I'll tell you, if you want to know, just how we
expect to manage in New York; Brice and I have been talking it all
over; and it's all going to be done on that thousand dollars he saved up
from his newspaper work, and we're not going to touch a cent of my money
till that is gone. Don't you call that pretty business-like?"
"Very," said Hilary, and he listened with apparent acquiescence to the
details of a life which he divined that Maxwell had planned from his own
simple experience. He did not like the notion of it for his daughter,
but he could not help himself, and it was a consolation to see that she
was in love with it.
She went back from it to the play itself, and told her father that now
Maxwell had got the greatest love business for it that there ever was.
She would not explain just what it was, she said, because her father
would get a wrong notion of it if she did. "But I have a great mind to
tell you something else," she said, "if you think you can behave
sensibly about it, papa. Do you suppose you can?"
Hilary said he would try, and she went on: "It's part of the happiness
of having got hold of the right kind of love business now, and I don't
know but it unconsciously suggested it to both of us, for we both
thought of the right thing at the same time; but in the beginning you
couldn't have told it from a quarrel." Her father started, and Louise
began to laugh. "Yes, we had quite a little tiff, just like _real_
married people, about my satirizing one of Godolphin's inspirations to
his face, and wounding his feelings. Brice is so cautious and so
gingerly with him; and he was vexed with me, and told me he wished I
wouldn't do it; and that vexed me, and I said I wouldn't have anything
to do with his play after this; and I didn't speak to him again till
after supper. I said he was self-centred, and he _is_. He's always
thinking about his play and its chances; and I suppose I would rather
have had him think more about me now and then. But I've discovered a way
now, and I believe it will serve the same purpose. I'm going to enter so
fully into his work that I shall be part of it; and when he is thinking
of that he will be thinking of me without knowing it. Now, you wouldn't
say there was anything in that to cry about, would you? and yet you see
I'm at it!" and with this she suddenly dropped her face on her father's
shoulder.
Hilary groaned in his despair of being able to imagine an injury
sufficiently atrocious to inflict on Maxwell for having brought this
grief upon his girl. At the sound of his groan, as if she perfectly
interpreted his meaning in it, she broke from a sob into a laugh. "Will
you never," she said, dashing away the tears, "learn to let me cry,
simply because I am a goose, papa, and a goose must weep without reason,
because she feels like it? I won't have you thinking that I am not the
happiest person in the world; and I was, even when I was suffering so
because I had to punish Brice for telling me I had done wrong. And if
you think I'm not, I will never tell you anything more, for I see you
can't be trusted. Will you?"
He said no to her rather complicated question, and he was glad to
believe that she was really as happy as she declared, for if he could
not have believed it, he would have had to fume away an intolerable deal
of exasperation. This always made him very hot and uncomfortable, and he
shrank from it, but he would have done it if it had been necessary. As
it was, he got back to his newspaper again with a sufficiently light
heart, when Louise gave him a final kiss, and went indoors and put
herself in authority for the day, and ordered what she liked for
luncheon. The maids were delighted to have her, and she had a welcome
from them all, which was full of worship for her as a bride whose
honeymoon was not yet over.
She went away before her mother got home, and she made her father own,
before she left him, that he had never had such a lovely day since he
could remember. He wanted to drive over to Magnolia with her; but she
accused him of wanting to go so that he could spy round a little, and
satisfy himself of the misery of her married life; and then he would not
insist.