The cook was young and vigorous, and a hired man on a farm might have
called her good-looking; but her charms did not interest Eddie. His soul
was replete with the companionship of his other self--Pheeny; and if
Delia had been as sumptuous a beauty as Cleopatra he would have been
still more afraid of her. He had no more desire to possess her than to
own the Kohinoor.
And Delia, in her turn, was far more interested in the winks and
flatteries of the grocer's boy and the milkman than in any conquest of
the fussy little fat man, who ate whatever she slammed before him and
never raised his eyes.
Pheeny, however, could not imagine this. She could not know how secure
she was in Eddie's heart, or how she had grown in and about his soul
until she fairly permeated his being.
So Pheeny lay up in the prison of her bed and imagined vain things,
interpreting the goings-on down-stairs with a fantastic cynicism that
would have startled Boccaccio. She did not openly charge Eddie with
these fancied treacheries. She found him guilty silently and silently
acquitted him of fault, abjectly asking herself what right she had to
deny him all acquaintance with beauty, hilarity, and health.
She remembered her mother's eternal moan, "All men are alike." She
dramatized her poor mouse of a husband as a devastating Don Juan; and
then forgave him, as most of the victims of Don Juan's ruthless piracies
forgave him.
She suffered hideously, however. Eddie, seeing the deep, sad look of her
eyes as they studied him, wondered and wondered, and often asked her
what the matter was; but she always smiled as a mother smiles at a child
that is too sweet to punish for any mischief, and she always answered:
"Nothing! Nothing!" But then she would sigh to the caverns of her soul.
And sometimes tears would drip from her brimming lids to her pillow.
Still, she would tell him nothing but "Nothing!"
Finally the long repose repaired her worn-out sinews and she grew well
enough to move about the house. She prospered on the medicine of a new
hope that she should soon be well enough to expel the third person who
made a crowd of their little home.
And then Luella Thickins came back to town. Luella had married long
before and moved away; but now she came back a widow, handsome instead
of pretty, billowy instead of willowy, seductive instead of spoony, and
with that fearsome menace a widow carries like a cloud about her.
Eddie spoke of meeting her "down-town," and in his fatuous innocence
announced that she was "as pirty as ever." If he had hit Pheeny with a
hatchet he would have inflicted a less painful wound.