When the spring opened, Bartley pushed Flavia about the sunny pavements in
a baby carriage, while Marcia paced alongside, looking in under the calash
top from time to time, arranging the bright afghan, and twitching
the little one's lace hood into place. They never noticed that other
perambulators were pushed by Irish nurse-girls or French _bonnes_; they had
paid somewhat more than they ought for theirs, and they were proud of it
merely as a piece of property. It was rather Bartley's ideal, as it is that
of most young American fathers, to go out with his wife and baby in that
way; he liked to have his friends see him; and he went out every afternoon
he could spare. When he could not go, Marcia went alone. Mrs. Halleck had
given her a key to the garden, and on pleasant mornings she always found
some of the family there, when she pushed the perambulator up the path, to
let the baby sleep in the warmth and silence of the sheltered place. She
chatted with Olive or the elder sisters, while Mrs. Halleck drove Cyrus
on to the work of tying up the vines and trimming the shrubs, with the
pitiless rigor of women when they get a man about some outdoor labor.
Sometimes, Ben Halleck was briefly of the party; and one morning when
Marcia opened the gate, she found him there alone with Cyrus, who was
busy at some belated tasks of horticulture. The young man turned at the
unlocking of the gate, and saw Marcia lifting the front wheels of the
perambulator to get it over the steps of the pavement outside. He limped
hastily down the walk to help her, but she had the carriage in the path
before he could reach, her, and he had nothing to do but to walk back at
its side, as she propelled it towards the house. “You see what a useless
creature a cripple is,” he said.
Marcia did not seem to have heard him. “Is your mother at home?” she asked.
“I think she is,” said Halleck. “Cyrus, go in and tell mother that Mrs.
Hubbard is here, won't you?”
Cyrus went, after a moment of self-respectful delay, and Marcia sat down
on a bench under a pear-tree beside the walk. Its narrow young leaves and
blossoms sprinkled her with shade shot with vivid sunshine, and in her
light dress she looked like a bright, fresh figure from some painter's
study of spring. She breathed quickly from her exertion, and her cheeks had
a rich, dewy bloom. She had pulled the perambulator round so that she might
see her baby while she waited, and she looked at the baby now, and not at
Halleck, as she said, “It is quite hot in the sun to-day.” She had a way of
closing her lips, after speaking, in that sweet smile of hers, and then of
glancing sidelong at the person to whom she spoke.
“I suppose it is,” said Halleck, who remained on foot. “But I haven't been
out yet. I gave myself a day off from the Law School, and I hadn't quite
decided what to do with it.”
Marcia leaned forward, and brushed a tendril of the baby's hair out of its
eye. “She's the greatest little sleeper that ever was when she gets into
her carriage,” she half mused, leaning back with her hands folded in her
lap, and setting her head on one side for the effect of the baby without
the stray ringlet. “She's getting so fat!” she said, proudly.
Halleck smiled. “Do you find it makes a difference in pushing her carriage,
from day to day?”
Marcia took his question in earnest, as she must take anything but the most
obvious pleasantry concerning her baby. “The carriage runs very easily; we
picked out the lightest one we could, and I never have any trouble with it,
except getting up curbstones and crossing Cambridge Street. I don't like to
cross Cambridge Street, there are always so many horse-cars. But it's all
down-hill coming here: that's one good thing.”
“That makes it a very bad thing going home, though,” said Halleck.
“Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other
side; it isn't so steep there.”
There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their
talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them
on the baby's afghan.
“Your mother won't like your spoiling her pear-tree,” said Marcia,
seriously.
“She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard.”
“Miss Hubbard!” repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond
derision. “How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!”
Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough
which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young
man's ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any
words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his
mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly
to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity
for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in
angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried
to make him take the baby. Little by little his compassion adjusted itself
to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in
the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage.
His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help
here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more
severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath
the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her
innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise,
infused itself into his sense of her.
He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing
her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the
blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the
luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his
reverie: Marcia had said something. “I beg your pardon?” he queried.
“Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?”
Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions,
had done. “No, I don't,” he answered.
“I was at your church.”
“I ought to have been there myself,” he returned, gravely, “and then I
should have known.”
She took his self-reproach literally. “You couldn't have seen me. I was
sitting pretty far back, and I went out before any of your family saw me.
Don't you go there?”
“Not always, I'm sorry to say. Or, rather, I'm sorry not to be sorry. What
church do you generally go to?”
“Oh, I don't know. Sometimes to one, and sometimes to another. Bartley used
to report the sermons, and we went round to all the churches then. That is
the way I did at home, and it came natural to me. But I don't like it very
well. I want Flavia should belong to some particular church.”
“There are enough to choose from,” said Halleck, with pensive sarcasm.
“Yes, that's the difficulty. But I shall make up my mind to one of them,
and then I shall always keep to it. What I mean is that I should like to
find out where most of the good people belong, and then have her be with
them,” pursued Marcia. “I think it's best to belong to some church, don't
you?”
There was something so bare, so spiritually poverty-stricken, in these
confessions and questions, that Halleck found nothing to say to them.
He was troubled, moreover, as to what the truth was in his own mind. He
answered, with a sort of mechanical adhesion to the teachings of his youth,
“I should be a recreant not to think so. But I'm not sure that I know what
you mean by belonging to some church,” he added. “I suppose you would want
to believe in the creed of the church, whichever it was.”
“I don't know that I should be particular,” said Marcia, with perfect
honesty.
Halleck laughed sadly. “I'm afraid _they_ would, then, unless you joined
the Broad Church.”
“What is that?” He explained as well as he could. At the end she repeated,
as if she had not followed him very closely: “I should like her to belong
to the church where most of the good people went. I think that would be the
right one, if you could only find which it is.” Halleck laughed again. “I
suppose what I say must sound very queer to you; but I've been thinking a
good deal about this lately.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Halleck. “I had no reason to laugh, either on
your account or my own. It's a serious subject.” She did not reply, and he
asked, as if she had left the subject, “Do you intend to pass the summer in
Boston?”
“No; I'm going down home pretty early, and I wanted to ask your mother what
is the best way to put away my winter things.”
“You'll find my mother very good authority on such matters,” said Halleck.
Through an obscure association with moths that corrupt, he added, “She's a
good authority on church matters, too.”
“I guess I shall talk with her about Flavia,” said Marcia.
Cyrus came out of the house. “Mis' Halleck will be here in a minute. She's
got to get red of a lady that's calling, first,” he explained.
“I will leave you, then,” said Halleck, abruptly.
“Good by,” answered Marcia, tranquilly. The baby stirred; she pushed the
carriage to and fro, without glancing after him as he walked away.
His mother came down the steps from the house, and kissed Marcia for
welcome, and looked under the carriage-top at the sleeping baby. “How she
_does_ sleep!” she whispered.
“Yes,” said Marcia, with the proud humility of a mother, who cannot deny
the merit of her child, “and she sleeps the whole night through. I'm
_never_ up with her. Bartley says she's a perfect Seven-Sleeper. It's a
regular joke with him,--her sleeping.”
“Ben was a good baby for sleeping, too,” said Mrs. Halleck, retrospectively
emulous. “It's one of the best signs. It shows that the child is strong and
healthy.” They went on to talk of their children, and in their community of
motherhood they spoke of the young man as if he were still an infant. “He
has never been a moment's care to me,” said Mrs. Halleck. “A well baby will
be well even in teething.”
“And I had somehow thought of him as sickly!” said Marcia, in
self-derision.
Tears of instant intelligence sprang into his mother's eyes. “And did you
suppose he was _always_ lame?” she demanded, with gentle indignation. “He
was the brightest and strongest boy that ever was, till he was twelve years
old. That's what makes it so hard to bear; that's what makes me wonder at
the way the child bears it! Did you never hear how it happened? One of the
big boys, as he called him, tripped him up at school, and he fell on his
hip. It kept him in bed for a year, and he's never been the same since;
he will always be a cripple,” grieved the mother. She wiped her eyes; she
never could think of her boy's infirmity without weeping. “And what seemed
the worst of all,” she continued, “was that the boy who did it never
expressed any regret for it, or acknowledged it by word or deed, though
he must have known that Ben knew who hurt him. He's a man here, now; and
sometimes Ben meets him. But Ben always says that he can stand it, if the
other one can. He was always just so from the first! He wouldn't let us
blame the boy; he said that he didn't mean any harm, and that all was fair
in play. And now he says he knows the man is sorry, and would own to what
he did, if he didn't have to own to what came of it. Ben says that very few
of us have the courage to face the consequences of the injuries we do, and
that's what makes people seem hard and indifferent when they are really not
so. There!” cried Mrs. Halleck. “I don't know as I ought to have told you
about it; I know Ben wouldn't like it. But I can't bear to have any one
think he was always lame, though I don't know why I shouldn't: I'm prouder
of him since it happened than ever I was before. I thought he was here with
you,” she added, abruptly.
“He went out just before you came,” said Marcia, nodding toward the gate.
She sat listening to Mrs. Halleck's talk about Ben; Mrs. Halleck took
herself to task from time to time, but only to go on talking about him
again. Sometimes Marcia commented on his characteristics, and compared them
with Bartley's, or with Flavia's, according to the period of Ben's life
under consideration.
At the end Mrs. Halleck said: “I haven't let you get in a word! Now you
must talk about _your_ baby. Dear little thing! I feel that she's been
neglected. But I'm always just so selfish when I get to running on about
Ben. They all laugh at me.”
“Oh, I like to hear about other children,” said Marcia, turning the
perambulator round. “I don't think any one can know too much that has the
care of children of their own.” She added, as if it followed from something
they had been saying of vaccination, “Mrs. Halleck, I want to talk with you
about getting Flavia christened. You know I never was christened.”
“Weren't you?” said Mrs. Halleck, with a dismay which she struggled to
conceal.
“No,” said Marcia, “father doesn't believe in any of those things, and
mother had got to letting them go, because he didn't take any interest in
them. They did have the first children christened, but I was the last.”
“I didn't speak with your father on the subject,” faltered Mrs. Halleck. “I
didn't know what his persuasion was.”
“Why, father doesn't belong to _any_ church! He believes in a God, but he
doesn't believe in the Bible.” Mrs. Halleck sank down on the garden seat
too much shocked to speak, and Marcia continued. “I don't know whether the
Bible is true or not; but I've often wished that I belonged to church.”
“You couldn't, unless you believed in the Bible,” said Mrs. Halleck.
“Yes, I know that. Perhaps I should, if anybody proved it to me. I presume
it could be explained. I never talked much with any one about it. There
must be a good many people who don't belong to church, although they
believe in the Bible. I should be perfectly willing to try, if I only knew
how to begin.”
In view of this ruinous open-mindedness, Mrs. Halleck could only say, “The
way to begin is to read it.”
“Well, I will try. How do you know, after you've become so that you believe
the Bible, whether you're fit to join the church?”
“It's hard to tell you, my dear. You have to feel first that you have a
Saviour,--that you've given your whole heart to him,--that he can save you,
and that no one else can,--that all you can do yourself won't help you.
It's an experience.”
Marcia looked at her attentively, as if this were all a very hard saying.
“Yes, I've heard of that. Some of the girls had it at school. But I never
did. Well,” she said at last, “I don't feel so anxious about myself, just
at present, as I do about Flavia. I want to do everything I can for Flavia,
Mrs. Halleck. I want her to be christened,--I want her to be baptized into
some church. I think a good deal about it. I think sometimes, what if she
should die, and I hadn't done that for her, when may be it was one of
the most important things--” Her voice shook, and she pressed her lips
together.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Halleck, tenderly, “I think it is the _most_
important thing.”
“But there are so many churches,” Marcia resumed. “And I don't know about
any of them. I told Mr. Halleck just now, that I should like her to belong
to the church where the best people went, if I could find it out. Of
course, it was a ridiculous way to talk; I knew he thought so. But what I
meant was that I wanted she should be with good people all her life; and I
didn't care what she believed.”
“It's very important to believe the truth, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck.
“But the truth is so hard to be certain of, and you know goodness as soon
as you see it. Mrs. Halleck, I'll tell you what I want: I want Flavia
should be baptized into your church. Will you let her?”
“_Let_ her? O my dear child, we shall be humbly thankful that it has been
put into your heart to choose for her what _we_ think is the true church,”
said Mrs. Halleck, fervently.
“I don't know about that,” returned Marcia. “I can't tell whether it's the
true church or not, and I don't know that I ever could; but I shall be
satisfied--if it's made you what you are,” she added, simply.
Mrs. Halleck did not try to turn away her praise with vain affectations of
humility. “We try to do right, Marcia,” she said. “Whenever we do it, we
must be helped to it by some power outside of ourselves. I can't tell you
whether it's our church; I'm not so sure of that as I used to be. I once
thought that there could be no real good out of it; but I _can't_ think
that, any more. Olive and Ben are as good children as ever lived; I _know_
they won't be lost; but neither of them belongs to our church.”
“Why, what church does he belong to?”
“He doesn't belong to any, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck, sorrowfully.
Marcia looked at her absently. “I knew Olive was a Unitarian; but I
thought--I thought he--”
“No, he doesn't,” returned Mrs. Halleck. “It has been a great cross to
his father and me. He is a good boy; but we think the _truth_ is in our
church!”
Marcia was silent a moment. Then she said, decisively, “Well, I should like
Flavia to belong to your church.”
“She couldn't belong to it now,” Mrs. Halleck explained. “That would have
to come later, when she could understand. But she could be christened in
it--dear little thing!”
“Well, christened, then. It must be the training he got in it. I've thought
a great deal about it, and I think my worst trouble is that I've been left
too free in everything. One mustn't be left too free. I've never had any
one to control me, and now I can't control myself at the very times when I
need to do it the most, with--with--When I 'in in danger of vexing--When
Bartley and I--”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Halleck, sympathetically.
“And Bartley is just so, too. He's always been left to himself. And Flavia
will need all the control we can give her,--I know she will. And I shall
have her christened in your church, and I shall teach her all about it. She
shall go to the Sunday school, and I will go to church, so that she can
have an example. I told father I should do it when he was up here, and he
said there couldn't be any harm in it. And I've told Bartley, and _he_
doesn't care.”
They were both far too single-minded and too serious to find anything droll
in the terms of the adhesion of Marcia's family to her plan, and Mrs.
Halleck entered into its execution with affectionate zeal.
“Ben, dear,” she said, tenderly, that evening, when they were all talking
it over in the family council, “I hope you didn't drop anything, when that
poor creature spoke to you about it this morning, that could unsettle her
mind in any way?”
“No, mother,” said Halleck, gently.
“I was sure you didn't,” returned his mother, repentantly.
They had been talking a long time of the matter, and Halleck now left the
room.
“Mother! How could you say such a thing to Ben?” cried Olive, in a quiver
of indignant sympathy. “Ben say anything to unsettle anybody's religious
purposes! He's got more religion now than all the rest of the family put
together!”
“Speak for yourself, Olive,” said one of the intermediary sisters.
“Why, Olive, I spoke because I thought she seemed to place more importance
on Ben's belonging to the church than anything else, and she seemed so
surprised when I told her he didn't belong to any.”
“I dare say she thinks Ben is good when she compares him with that mass of
selfishness of a husband of hers,” said Olive. “But I will thank her,” she
added, hotly, “not to compare Ben with Bartley Hubbard, even to Bartley
Hubbard's disadvantage. I don't feel flattered by it.”
“Of course she thinks all the world of her husband,” said Mrs. Halleck.
“And I know Ben is good; and, as you say, he is religious; I feel that,
though I don't understand how, exactly. I wouldn't hurt his feelings for
the world, Olive, you know well enough. But it was a stumbling-block when I
had to tell that poor, pretty young thing that Ben didn't belong to church;
and I could see that it puzzled her. I couldn't have believed,” continued
Mrs. Halleck, “that there was any person in a Christian land, except among
the very lowest, that seemed to understand so little about the Christian
religion, or any scheme of salvation. Really, she talked to me like a
pagan. She sat there much better dressed and better educated than I was;
but I felt like a missionary talking to a South Sea Islander.”
“I wonder the old Bartlett pear didn't burst into a palm-tree over your
heads,” said Olive. Mrs. Halleck looked grieved at her levity, and Olive
hastened to add: “Don't take it to heart, mother! I understood just what
you meant, and I can imagine just how shocking Mrs. Hubbard's heathen
remarks must have been. We should all be shocked if we knew how many people
there were like her, and we should all try to deny it, and so would they. I
guess Christianity is about as uncommon as civilization,--and that's _very_
uncommon. If her poor, feeble mind was such a chaos, what do you suppose
her husband's is?”
This would certainly not have been easy for Mrs. Halleck to say then, or
to say afterward, when Bartley walked up to the font in her church, with
Marcia at his side, and Flavia in his arms, and a faintly ironical smile on
his face, as if he had never expected to be got in for this, but was going
to see it through now. He had, in fact, said, “Well, let's go the whole
figure,” when Marcia had expressed a preference for having the rite
performed in church, instead of in their own house.
He was unquestionably growing stout, and even Mrs. Halleck noticed that
his blonde face was unpleasantly red that day. He was, of course, not
intemperate. He always had beer with his lunch, which he had begun to take
down town since the warm weather had come on and made the walk up the hill
to Clover Street irksome: and he drank beer at his dinner,--he liked a late
dinner, and they dined at six, now,--because it washed away the fatigues
of the day, and freshened you up. He was rather particular about his beer,
which he had sent in by the gross,--it came cheaper that way; after trying
both the Cincinnati and the Milwaukee lagers, and making a cursory test
of the Boston brand, he had settled down upon the American tivoli; it
was cheap, and you could drink a couple of bottles without feeling it.
Freshened up by his two bottles, he was apt to spend the evening in an
amiable drowse and get early to bed, when he did not go out on newspaper
duty. He joked about the three fingers of fat on his ribs, and frankly
guessed it was the beer that did it; at such times he said that perhaps he
should have to cut down on his tivoli.
Marcia and he had not so much time together as they used to have; she was a
great deal taken up with the baby, and he found it dull at home, not doing
anything or saying anything; and when he did not feel sleepy, he sometimes
invented work that took him out at night. But he always came upstairs after
putting his hat on, and asked Marcia if he could help her about anything.
He usually met other newspaper men on these excursions, and talked
newspaper with them, airing his favorite theories. He liked to wander
about with reporters who were working up cases; to look in at the police
stations, and go to the fires; and he was often able to give the Events men
points that had escaped the other reporters. If asked to drink, he always
said, “Thanks, no; I don't do anything in that way. But if you'll make it
beer, I don't mind.” He took nothing but beer when he hurried out of the
theatre into one of the neighboring resorts, just as the great platters of
stewed kidneys and lyonnaise potatoes came steaming up out of the kitchen,
prompt to the drop of the curtain on the last act. Here; sometimes, he met
a friend, and shared with him his dish of kidneys and his schooner of beer;
and he once suffered himself to be lured by the click of the balls into the
back room. He believed that he played a very good game of billiards; but he
was badly beaten that night. He came home at daylight, fifty dollars out.
But he had lost like a gentleman in a game with gentlemen; and he never
played again.
By day he worked hard, and since his expenses had been increased by
Flavia's coming, he had undertaken more work for more pay. He still
performed all the routine labor of a managing editor, and he now wrote the
literary notices of the Events, and sometimes, especially if there was
anything new, the dramatic criticisms; he brought to the latter task all
the freshness of a man who, till the year before, had not been half a dozen
times inside a theatre.
He attributed the fat on his ribs to the tivoli; perhaps it was also owing
in some degree to a good conscience, which is a much easier thing to keep
than people imagine. At any rate, he now led a tranquil, industrious, and
regular life, and a life which suited him so well that he was reluctant to
interrupt it by the visit to Equity, which he and Marcia had talked of in
the early spring. He put it off from time to time, and one day when she was
pressing him to fix some date for it he said, “Why can't you go, Marcia?”
“Alone?” she faltered.
“Well, no; take the baby, of course. And I'll run down for a day or two
when I get a chance.”
Marcia seemed in these days to be schooling herself against the impulses
that once brought on her quarrels with Bartley. “A day or two--” she began,
and then stopped and added gravely, “I thought you said you were going to
have several weeks' vacation.”
“Oh, don't tell me what I _said_!” cried Bartley. “That was before I
undertook this extra work, or before I knew what a grind it was going to
be. Equity is a good deal of a dose for me, any way. It's all well enough
for you, and I guess the change from Boston will do you good, and do the
baby good, but _I_ shouldn't look forward to three weeks in Equity with
unmitigated hilarity.”
“I know it will be stupid for you. But you need the rest. And the Hallecks
are going to be at North Conway, and they said they would come over,” urged
Marcia. “I know we should have a good time.”
Bartley grinned. “Is that your idea of a good time, Marsh? Three weeks of
Equity, relieved by a visit from such heavy weights as Ben Halleck and his
sisters? Not any in mine, thank you.”
“How can you--how _dare_ you speak of them so!” cried Marcia lightening
upon him. “Such good friends of yours--such good people--” Her voice shook
with indignation and wounded feeling.
Bartley rose and took a turn about the room, pulling down his waistcoat and
contemplating its outward slope with a smile. “Oh, I've got more friends
than I can shake a stick at. And with pleasure at the helm, goodness is
a drug in the market,--if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor. Look here,
Marcia,” he added, severely. “If you like the Hallecks, all well and good;
I sha'n't interfere with you; but they bore me. I outgrew Ben Halleck years
ago. He's duller than death. As for the old people, there's no harm in
them,--though _they're_ bores, too,--nor in the old girls; but Olive
Halleck doesn't treat me decently. I suppose that just suits you: I've
noticed that you never like the women that _do_ treat me decently.”
“They don't treat _me_ decently!” retorted Marcia.
“Oh, Miss Kingsbury treated you very well that night. She couldn't imagine
your being jealous of her politeness to me.”
Marcia's temper fired at his treacherous recurrence to a grievance which he
had once so sacredly and sweetly ignored. “If you wish to take up bygones,
why don't you go back to Hannah Morrison at once? She treated you even
better than Miss Kingsbury.”
“I should have been very willing to do that,” said Bartley, “but I thought
it might remind you of a disagreeable little episode in your own life, when
you flung me away, and had to go down on your knees to pick me up again.”
These thrusts which they dealt each other in their quarrels, however blind
and misdirected, always reached their hearts: it was the wicked will that
hurt, rather than the words. Marcia rose, bleeding inwardly, and her
husband felt the remorse of a man who gets the best of it in such an
encounter.
“Oh, I'm sorry I said that, Marcia! I didn't mean it; indeed I--” She
disdained to heed him, as she swept out of the room, and up the stairs; and
his anger flamed out again.
“I give you fair warning,” he called after her, “not to try that trick of
locking the door, or I will smash it in.”
Her answer was to turn the key in the door with a click which he could not
fail to hear.
The peace in which they had been living of late was very comfortable to
Bartley; he liked it; he hated to have it broken; he was willing to do what
he could to restore it at once. If he had no better motive than this, he
still had this motive; and he choked down his wrath, and followed Marcia
softly upstairs. He intended to reason with her, and he began, “I say,
Marsh,” as he turned the door-knob. But you cannot reason through a
keyhole, and before he knew he found himself saying, “Will you open this?”
in a tone whose quiet was deadly. She did not answer; he heard her stop
in her movements about the room, and wait, as if she expected him to ask
again. He hesitated a moment whether to keep his threat of breaking the
door in; but he turned away and went down stairs, and so into the street.
Once outside, he experienced the sense of release that comes to a man from
the violation of his better impulses; but he did not know what to do or
where to go. He walked rapidly away; but Marcia's eyes and voice seemed to
follow him, and plead with him for his forbearance. But he answered his
conscience, as if it had been some such presence, that he had forborne too
much already, and that now he should not humble himself; that he was right
and should stand upon his right. There was not much comfort in it, and he
had to brace himself again and again with vindictive resolution.