“Ah but she is making plans! I can see it. And the trouble is that she
doesn’t say a word about it. She usually talks about whatever is in her
head. I wondered if you mightn’t know?”
Against the insistent question in his eyes I opposed truthfully a blank
ignorance; but I had at once felt the need for caution. He stood in
the clinging, dirty snowflakes, forlorn, looking as if he needed to
be whistled home. His dejection wrung from me the delayed information
that I had not seen her for some time. I had--although this I did not
say--stayed away from her.
He pointedly requested that I come down to see her. “You know how she
is--excitable? She’s got herself tremendously worked-up over the panic;
and she was already moping over Molly Underhill.”
I could not resist telling him that Eva had telephoned me, some time
since, of having gone to his mother for comfort on the score of her
responsibility for Molly’s death. She had said to Mrs. Van Suydam
that upon a certain occasion she had been so cruel to Molly about
her recitation that she felt this had had a large share in breaking
down her desire to live. Mrs. Van Suydam, it appeared, had remarked
that the opinion of one person was never so powerful as that would
come to. I did not tell him that this had only too evidently clipped
Eva’s spirits; but he turned on me an eye so comprehending that I
became lost in a confused speculation on how deeply he might actually
understand Eva. And, as I submitted to his instantly popping me in a
taxi, getting in himself and giving the driver the number of the little
house in Eleventh Street, I wondered feebly if my supineness arose
from the snow slipping down my own back or from a guilty knowledge
of my unwillingness to go at all. I felt like saying: “I have my own
troubles.” No one took their troubles to Eva.
The taxi skidded, and he re-adjusted the angle of his hat. Why--I
asked myself pettishly--are men fussy about their hats which look the
same on any slant? His relieved face, as he contemplated me, a virtual
prisoner on my way to taking over a share of his burden, produced in me
a contrition in the toils of which he, and Eva, I made no doubt, would
use me.
“How is work?” I asked casually.
“Stopped.” Architects, he went on with wry amusement, would soon be
in the class of artists who conceived and executed those pleasures
which are luxuries, such as--he paused to grin amiably at me--books.
Our taxi hurled itself downtown along canons already shut in by more
buildings than the frightened population needed. He laughed heartily
at the corollary he now propounded: as he went down from usefulness in
a man’s work, he automatically went up according to his wife’s circle.
“However,” he said with a disheartened drop in his amusement, “she’s
worried because she--well, then, because she’s Eva! She thinks I shan’t
make enough money to keep us out of the poorhouse. I dislike to talk
about such matters, Dinah; but you might put it in her head that she
needn’t worry about the poorhouse. We--my mother and I--have a policy,
as my father had--he learned it from his father, and so on back--to
hold on to real estate. We’re strapped, but not smashed. If you could
explain this to her?”