She sighed. “Oh, dear me! Nick is eternally harping on that same thing!
And he’s driving at nothing.” She reminded me that she was endeavouring
to lay before me the case of Nicholas’ jealousy of her reputation.
“It must be because he is, undoubtedly, old-fashioned. It sticks in his
craw, one might say, that his wife works along a line quite independent
of him,” I explained it.
“My eye!” said Eva, to settle that. “He, as an architect, is jealous of
me as a novelist.” She said that Glidden had started it by his effort
to boost Eva with her mother-in-law. His dictum had swept the rooms, so
that in the end they had thronged around Eva with this new conception
of her in their eyes. Except Mrs. Van Suydam: she held tightly to her
own notions. The old lace at her throat and wrists was no more redolent
of a cedar closet than her notions. “You know how, at a thing that
has taken you aback, the muscles of your face slip, you think, for
the rest of your life? Hers had slipped, at the shock of finding that
there are those who consider me greater than the Van Suydams, into the
inflexible front that she meant from then on to show. She, simply,
won’t acknowledge it.”
In fairness to the absent Nicholas, I suggested that possibly he had
had no pang of jealousy.
She gave me a long look. “I saw his face. He said to me--laughing
it off: ‘A prophet in his own country, eh? A man’s reputation never
exists in his family.’ The cronies were coming up to say goodnight; and
they said ‘Nick, we never before realized what a famous woman you had
married. You certainly did look high!’ Of course, the next morning I
tried to smooth it over.”