THE MAN AND THE CLASS
"I oughtn't to have done it, Benjy," said President, following me with
diffidence under the waving palm branches and up the staircase.
"Nonsense, President," I answered; "I'm awfully glad you've come. Only
if I'd known about it, I'd have met you at the station."
"No, I oughtn't to have done it, Benjy," he repeated humbly, standing in
a dejected attitude in the centre of the guest room next to Jessy's. He
had entered nervously, as if he were stepping on glass, and when I
motioned to a chair he shook his head and glanced uneasily at the
delicate chintz covering.
"I'd better not sit down. I'm feared I'll hurt it."
"It's made to be sat in. You aren't going to stand up in the middle of
the room all night, old fellow, are you?"
At this he appeared to hesitate, and a pathetic groping showed itself in
his large, good-humoured face.
"You see, I've been down in the mines," he said, "an' anything so fancy
makes my flesh crawl."
"I wish you'd give up that work. It's a shame to have you do it when
I've got more money than I can find investments for."
"I'm a worker, Benjy, and I'll die a worker. Pa wa'nt a worker, and
that's why he took to drink."
"Well, sit down now, and make yourself at home. I've got to go back
downstairs, but I'll come up again the very minute that it's over."
Pushing him, in spite of his stubborn, though humble, resistance, into
the depths of the chintz-covered chair, I went hurriedly back to the
dinner-table, and took my seat beside Mrs. Tyler, who remarked with a
tact which won me completely:--
"Mrs. Starr has been telling us such interesting things about your
brother. He has a very fine head."
"By George, I'm glad I shook his hand," said the General, in his loud,
kindly way. "Bring him to see me, Ben, I like a worker."
The terrible minute in which I had sat there, paralysed by the shame of
acknowledging him, was still searing my mind. As I met Sally's eyes over
the roses and lilies, I wondered if she had seen my cowardliness as I
had seen Jessy's, and been repelled by it? When the dinner was over, and
the last guest had gone, I asked myself the question again while I went
upstairs to bring my brother from his retirement. As I opened the door,
he started up from the chair in which I had placed him, and began
rubbing his eyes as he followed me timidly out of the room. At the table
Sally seated herself opposite to him, and talked in her simple, kindly
manner while he ate his dinner.
"Pour his wine, Ben," she said, dismissing the butler, "there are too
many frivolities, aren't there? I like a clear space, too."
Turning toward him she pushed gently away the confusing decorations, and
removed the useless number of forks from beside his plate. If the way he
ate his soup and drank his wine annoyed her, there was no hint of it in
her kind eyes and her untroubled smile. She, who was sensitive to the
point of delicacy, I knew, watched him crumble his bread into his green
turtle, and gulp down his sherry, with a glance which apparently was
oblivious of the thing at which it looked. Jessy shrank gradually away,
confessing presently that she had a headache and would like to go
upstairs to bed; and when she kissed President's cheek, I saw aversion
written in every line of her shrinking figure. Yet opposite to him sat
Sally, who was a Bland and a Fairfax, and not a tremor, not the flicker
of an eyelash, disturbed her friendly and charming expression. What was
the secret of that exquisite patience, that perfect courtesy, which was
confirmed by the heart, not by the lips? Did the hidden cause of it lie
in the fact that it was not a manner, after all, but the very essence of
a character, whose ruling spirit was exhaustless sympathy?
"I've told Benjy, ma'am," said President, selecting the largest fork by
some instinct for appropriateness, "that I know I oughtn't to have done
it."
"To have done what?" repeated Sally kindly.
"That I oughtn't to have come in on a party like that dressed as I am,
and I so plain and uneddicated."
"You mustn't worry," she answered, bending forward in all the
queenliness of her braided wreath and her bare shoulders, "you mustn't
worry--not for a minute. It was natural that you should come to your
brother at once, and, of course, we want you to stay with us."
I had never seen her fail when social intuition guided her, and she did
not fail now. He glanced down at his clothes in a pleased, yet
hesitating, manner.
"These did very well on Sunday in Pocahontas," he said, "but somehow
they don't seem to suit here; I reckon so many flowers and lights kind
of dazzle my eyes."
"They do perfectly well," answered Sally, speaking in a firm, direct way
as if she were talking to a child; "but if you would feel more
comfortable in some of Ben's clothes, he has any number of them at your
service. He is about your height, is he not?"
"To think of little Benjy growin' so tall," he remarked with a kind of
ecstasy, and when we went into the library for a smoke, he insisted upon
measuring heights with me against the ledge of the door. Then, alone
with me and the cheerful crackling of the log fire, his embarrassment
disappeared, and he began to ask a multitude of eager questions about
myself and Jessy and my marriage.
"And so pa died," he remarked sadly, between the long whiffs of his
pipe.
"I'm not sure it wasn't the best thing he ever did," I responded.
"Well, you see, Benjy, he wa'nt a worker, and when a man ain't a worker
there's mighty little to stand between him and drink. Now, ma, she was a
worker."
"And we got it from her. That's why we hate to be idle, I suppose."
"Did it ever strike you, Benjy," he enquired solemnly, after a minute,
"that in the marriage of ma and pa the breeches were on the wrong one of
'em? Pa wa'nt much of a man, but he would have made a female that we
could have been proud of. With all the good working qualities, we never
could be proud of ma when we considered her as a female."
"Well, I don't know, but I think she was the best we ever had."
"We are proud of Jessy," he pursued reflectively.
"Yes, we are proud of Jessy," I repeated, and as I uttered the words, I
remembered her beautiful blighted look, while she sat cold and silent,
crumbling her bit of bread.
"And we are proud of you, Benjy," he added, "but you ain't any
particular reason to be proud of me. You can't be proud of a man that
ain't had an eddication."
"Well, the education doesn't make the man, you know."
"It does a good deal towards it. The stuffing goes a long way with the
goose, as poor ma used to say. Do you ever think what ma would have been
if she'd had an eddication? An eddication and breeches would have made a
general of her. It must take a powerful lot of patience to stand being
born a female."
He took a wad of tobacco from his pocket, eyed it timidly, and after
glancing at the tiled hearth, put it back again.
"You know what I would do if I were a rich man, Benjy?" he said; "I'd
buy a railroad."
"You'd have to be a very rich man, indeed, to do that."
"It's a little dead-beat road, the West Virginia and Wyanoke. I
overheard two gentlemen talking about it yesterday in Pocahontas, and
one of 'em had been down to look at those worked-out coal fields at
Wyanoke. 'If I wa'nt in as many schemes as I could float, I'd buy up a
control of that road,' said the one who had been there, 'you mark my
words, there's better coal in those fields than has ever come out of
'em.' They called him Huntley, and he said he'd been down with an
expert."
"Huntley?" I caught at the name, for he was one of the shrewdest
promoters in the South. "If he thinks that, why didn't he get control of
the road himself?"
"The other wanted him to. He said the time would come when they tapped
the coal fields that the Great South Midland and Atlantic would want the
little road as a feeder."
"So he believed the Wyanoke coal fields weren't worked out, eh?"
"He said they wa'nt even developed. You see it was all a secret, and
they didn't pay any attention to me, because I was just a common miner."
"And couldn't buy a railroad. Well, President, if it comes to anything,
you shall have your share. Meanwhile, I'll run out to Wyanoke and look
around."
With the idea still in my mind, I went into the General's office next
day, and told him that I had decided to accept the presidency of the
Union Bank.
"Well, I'm sorry to lose you, Ben. Perhaps you'll come back to the road
in another capacity when I am dead. It will be a bigger road then. We're
buying up the Tennessee and Carolina, you know."
"It's a great road you've made, General, and I like to serve it. By the
way, I'm going to West Virginia in a day or two to have a look at the
West Virginia and Wyanoke. What do you know of the coal fields at
Wyanoke?"
"No 'count ones. I wouldn't meddle with that little road if I were you.
It will go bankrupt presently, and then we'll buy it, I suppose, at our
own price. It runs through scrub land populated by old field pines. How
is that miner brother of yours, Ben? I saw Sally at the theatre with
him. You've got a jewel, my boy, there's no doubt of that. When I looked
at her sailing down the room on his arm last night, by George, I wished
I was forty years younger and married to her myself."
Some hours later I repeated his remark to Sally, when I went home at
dusk and found her sitting before a wood fire in her bedroom, with her
hat and coat on, just as she had dropped there after a drive with
President.
"Well, I wouldn't have the General at any age. You needn't be jealous,
Ben," she responded. "I'm too much like Aunt Matoaca."
"He always said you were," I retorted, "but, oh, Sally, you are an
angel! When I saw you rise at dinner last night, I wanted to squeeze you
in my arms and kiss you before them all."
The little scar by her mouth dimpled with the old childish expression of
archness.
"Suppose you do it now, sir," she rejoined, with the primness of Miss
Mitty, and a little later, "What else was there to do but rise, you
absurd boy? Poor mamma used to tell me that grandpapa always said to
her, 'When in doubt choose the kindest way.'"
"And yet he disinherited his favourite daughter."
"Which only proves, my dear, how much easier it is to make a proverb
than to practise it."
"Do you know, Sally," I began falteringly, after a minute, "there is
something I ought to tell you, and that is, that when I looked up at the
table last night and saw President in the doorway, my first feeling was
one of shame."
She rubbed her cheek softly against my sleeve.
"Shall I confess something just as dreadful?" she asked. "When I looked
up and saw him standing there my first feeling was exactly the same."
"Sally, I am so thankful."
"You wicked creature, to want me to be as bad as yourself."
"It couldn't have lasted with you but a second."
"It didn't, but a second is an hour in the mind of a snob."
"Well, we were both snobs together, and that's some comfort, anyway."
For the three days that President remained with us he wore my clothes,
in which he looked more than ever like a miner attired for church, and
carried himself with a resigned and humble manner.
Sally took him to the theatre and to drive with her in the afternoon,
and I carried him to the General's office and over the Capitol, which he
surveyed with awed and admiring eyes. Only Jessy still shrank from him,
and not once during his visit were we able to prevail upon her to appear
with him in the presence of strangers. There was always an excuse ready
to trip off her tongue--she had a headache, she was going to the
dressmaker's, the milliner's, the dentist's even; and I honestly believe
that she sought cheerfully this last place of torture as an escape. To
the end, however, he regarded her with an affection that fell little
short of adoration.
"Who'd have thought that little Jessy would have shot up into a regular
beauty!" he exclaimed for the twentieth time as he stood ready to
depart. "She takes arter pa, and I always said the only thing against pa
was that he wa'nt born a female."
He kissed her good-by in a reverential fashion, and after a cordial,
though exhausted, leave-taking from Sally, we went together to West
Virginia. In spite of the General's advice, I had decided to take a look
at the coal fields of Wyanoke, and a week later, when I returned to
Richmond, I was the owner of a control of the little West Virginia and
Wyanoke Railroad. It was a long distance from the presidency of the
Great South Midland and Atlantic, but I watched still from some vantage
ground in my imagination, the gleaming tracks of the big road sweeping
straight on to the southern horizon.
For the next few years there was hardly a shadow on the smiling surface
of our prosperity. Society had received us in spite of my father, in
spite even of my brother; and the day that had made me Sally's husband
had given me a place, if an alien one, in the circle in which she moved.
I was there at last, and it was neither her fault nor mine if I carried
with me into that stained-glass atmosphere something of the
consciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at the
kitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I felt
vaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physical
presence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hovering
uncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had never
learned--would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to the
people with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them when
brought face to face with the fact of their absence. The lightness of
life taught me nothing except that I was built in mind and in body upon
a heavier plan. At the dinner-table, when the airy talk floated about
me, I felt again and again that the sparkling trivialities settled like
thistledown upon the solid mass I presented, and remained there because
of my native inability to waft them back. It was still as impossible for
me to entertain pretty girls in pink tarlatan as it had been on the
night of my first party; and the memory of that disastrous social
episode stung me at times when I stood large and awkward before a gay
and animated maiden, or sat wedged in, like a massive block, between two
patient and sleepy mothers. These people were all Sally's friends, not
mine, and it was for her sake, I never forgot for a minute, that they
had accepted me. With just such pleasant condescension they would still
have accepted me, I knew, if I had, in truth, entered their company with
my basket of potatoes or carrots on my arm. One alone held out
unwaveringly through the years; for Miss Mitty, shut with her pride and
her portraits in the old grey house, obstinately closed her big mahogany
doors against our repeated friendly advances. Sometimes at dusk, as I
passed on the crooked pavement under the two great sycamores, I would
glance up at the windows, where the red firelight glimmered on the small
square panes, and fancy that I saw her long, oval face gazing down on me
from between the parted lace curtains. But she made no sign of
forgiveness, and when Sally went to see her, as she did sometimes, the
old lady received her formally in the drawing-room, with a distant and
stately manner. She, who was the mixture of a Bland and a Fairfax, sat
enthroned upon her traditions, while we of the common, outside world
walked by under the silvery boughs of her sycamores.
"Aunt Mitty has told Selim not to admit me," said Sally one day at
luncheon. "I know she wasn't out in this dreadful March wind--she never
leaves the house except in summer--and yet when I went there, he told me
positively she was not at home. When I think of her all alone hour after
hour with Aunt Matoaca's things around her, I feel as if it would break
my heart. George says she is looking very badly."
"Does George see her?" I asked, glancing up from my cup of coffee, while
I waited for the light to a cigar. "I didn't imagine he had enough
attentions left over from his hunters to bestow upon maiden ladies."
The sugar tongs were in her hand, and she looked not at me, but at the
lump of sugar poised above her cup, as she answered,
"He is so good."
"Good?" I echoed lightly; "do you call George good? The General thinks
he's a sad scamp."
The lump of sugar dropped with a splash into her cup, and her eyes were
dark as she raised them quickly to my face. Instinctively I felt, with a
blind groping of perception, that I had wounded her pride, or her
loyalty, or some other hereditary attribute of the Blands and the
Fairfaxes that I could not comprehend.
"If I wanted an estimate of goodness, I don't think I'd go to the
General as an authority," she retorted.
"I'm sorry you never liked him, Sally. He's a great man."
"Well, he isn't _my_ great man anyway," she retorted. "I prefer Dr.
Theophilus or George."
I laughed gayly. "The doctor is a mollycoddle and George is a fop." My
tone was jaunty, yet her words were like the prick of a needle in a
sensitive place. What was her praise of George except the confession of
an appreciation of the very things that I could never possess? I knew
she loved me and not George--was not her marriage a proof of this
sufficient to cover a lifetime?--yet I knew also that the external
graces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for her
the charm of habit, of association, of racial memory. Would the power in
me that had captured her serve as well through a future of familiar
possession as it had served in the supreme moment of conquest? I could
not go through life, as I had once said, forever pushing a wheel up a
hill, and the strength of a shoulder might prove, after all, less
effective in the freedom of daily intercourse than the quickness or
delicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered,
the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in the
first rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and of little
worth?
"There are worse things than a mollycoddle or a fop," she rejoined after
a pause, and added quickly, while old Esdras left the dining-room to
answer a ring at the bell, "That's either Bonny Page or George now. One
of them is coming to take me out."
For a moment I hoped foolishly that the visitor might be Bonny Page, but
the sound of George's pleasant drawling voice was heard speaking to old
Esdras, and as the curtains swung back, he crossed the threshold and
came over to take Sally's outstretched hand.
"You're lunching late to-day," he said. "I don't often find you here at
this hour, Ben."
"No, I'm not a man-about-town like you," I replied, pushing the cigars
and the lamp toward him; "the business of living takes up too much of my
time."
He leaned over, without replying to me, his hand on the back of Sally's
chair, his eyes on her face.
"It's all right, Sally," he said in a low voice, and when he drew back,
I saw that he had laid a spray of sweet alyssum on the table beside her
plate.
Her eyes shone suddenly as if she were looking at sunlight, and when she
smiled up at him, there was an expression in her face, half gratitude,
half admiration, that made it very beautiful. While I watched her, I
tried to overcome an ugly irrational resentment because George had been
the one to call that tremulous new beauty into existence.
"How like you it was," she returned, almost in a whisper, with the spray
of sweet alyssum held to her lips, "and how can I thank you?"
His slightly wooden features, flushed now with a fine colour, as if he
had been riding in the March wind, softened until I hardly knew them.
Standing there in his immaculate clothes, with his carefully groomed
mustache hiding a trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, a
George with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as an
acquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked into
being, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened in
George, who had lost her, some quality--inscrutable and elusive--that
she had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this quality
was, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding,
sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared to
contain and possess them all. The mere fact of its existence, and that I
recognised without explaining it, had the effect of a barrier which
separated me for the moment from my wife and the man to whom she was
related by the ties of race and of class. Again I was aware of that
sense of strangeness, of remoteness, which I had felt on the night of
our home-coming when I had stood, spellbound, before Bonny Page's
exquisite grooming and the shining gloss on her hair and boots.
Something--a trifle, perhaps, had passed between Sally and George--and
the reason I did not understand it was because I belonged to another
order and had inherited different perceptions from theirs. The
trifle--whatever it was--appeared visibly, I knew, before us; it was
evident and on the surface, and if I failed to discern it what did that
prove except the shortness of the vision through which I looked? A
physical soreness, like that of a new bruise, attacked my heart, and
rising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out,
leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat in
the hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to her
lips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by the
tenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she was
mine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keener
comprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not of
jealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curious
eccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush of
ambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in the
things in which success was possible. If I could not give what George
gave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better.
When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, I
had little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they had
always done to the possession of power. Only let that power find its
fullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as the
living present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all,
what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life,
while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibre
woven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust.
Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way to
triumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to the
dazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound up
with my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feeling
from which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities of
my position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passed
through my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and kept
me tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. For
pleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or an
absent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to think
or to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar after
dinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bare
shoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in New
York, and during my absence, it never occurred to me to enquire how she
filled her long, empty days. She was sure of me, she trusted me, I knew;
and in the future, I told myself when I had leisure to think of it--next
year, perhaps--I should begin again to play the part of an ardent lover.
She was as desirable--she was far dearer to me than she had ever been in
her life, but while I held her safe and close in my clasp, my mind
reached out with its indomitable energy after the uncertain, the
unattained. I had my wife--what I wanted now was a fortune and a great
name to lay at her feet.
And all these months did she ever question, ever ask herself, while she
watched me struggling day after day with the lust for power, if the
thing that I sought to give her would in the end turn to Dead Sea fruit
at her lips? Question she may have done in her heart, but no hint of it
ever reached me--no complaint of her marriage ever disturbed the outward
serenity in which we lived. Yet, deep in myself, I heard always a still
small voice, which told me that she demanded something far subtler and
finer than I had given--something that belonged inherently to the nature
of George Bolingbroke rather than to mine. Even now, though she loved me
and not George, it was George who was always free, who was always
amiable, who was always just ready and just waiting to be called. On
another day, a month or two later, he came in again with his blossom of
sweet alyssum, and again her eyes grew shining and grateful, while the
old bruise throbbed quickly to life in my heart.
"Is it all right still?" she asked, and he answered, "All right," with
his rare smile, which lent a singular charm to his softened features.
Then he glanced across at me and made, I realised, an effort to be
friendly.
"You ought to get a horse, Ben," he remarked, "it would keep you from
getting glum. If you'd hunted with us yesterday, you would have seen
Bonny Page take a gate like a bird."
"I tried to follow," said Sally, "but Prince Charlie refused."
"You mean I wouldn't let go your bridle," returned George, in a
half-playful, half-serious tone.
The bruise throbbed again. Here, also, I was shut out--I who had carried
potatoes to George's door while he was off learning to follow the
hounds. His immaculate, yet careless, dress; the perfection of his
manner, which seemed to make him a part of the surroundings in which he
stood; the very smoothness and slenderness of the hand that rested on
Sally's chair--all these produced in me a curious and unreasonable
sensation of anger.
"I forbid you to jump, Sally," I said, almost sharply; "you know I hate
it."
She leaned forward, glancing first at me and then at George, with an
expression of surprise.
"Why, what's the matter, Ben?" she asked. "He's a perfect bear, isn't
he, George?"
"The best way to keep her from jumping," observed George, pleasantly
enough, though his face flushed, "is to be on the spot to catch her
bridle or her horse's mane or anything else that's handy. It's the only
means I've found successful, for there was never a Bland yet who didn't
go straight ahead and do the thing he was forbidden to. Miss Mitty told
me with pride that she had been eating lobster, which she always hated,
and I discovered her only reason was that the doctor had ordered her not
to touch it."
"Then I shan't forbid, I'll entreat," I replied, recovering myself with
an effort. "Please don't jump, Sally, I implore it."
"I won't jump if you'll come with me, Ben," she answered.
I laughed shortly, for how was it possible to explain to two Virginians
of their blood and habits that a man of six feet two inches could not
sit a horse for the first time without appearing ridiculous in the eyes
even of the woman who loved him? They had grown up together in the
fields or at the stables, and a knowledge of horse-flesh was as much a
part of their birthright as the observance of manners. The one I could
never acquire; the other I had attained unaided and in the face of the
tremendous barriers that shut me out. The repeated insistence upon the
fact that Sally was a Bland aroused in me, whenever I met it, an
irritation which I tried in vain to dispel. To be a Bland meant, after
all, simply to be removed as far as possible from any temperamental
relation to the race of Starrs.
"I wish I could, dear," I answered, as I rose to go out, "but remember,
I've never been on a horse in my life and it's too late to begin."
"Oh, I forgot. Of course you can't," she rejoined. "So if George isn't
strong enough to hold me back, I'll have to go straight after Bonny."
"I promise you I'll swing on with all my might, Ben," said George, with
a laugh in which I felt there was an amiable condescension, as from the
best horseman in his state to a man who had never ridden to hounds.
A little later, as I walked down the street, past the old grey house,
under the young budding leaves of the sycamores, the recollection of
this amiable condescension returned to me like the stab of a knife. The
image of Sally, mounted on Prince Charlie, at George's side, troubled my
thoughts, and I wondered, with a pang, if the people who saw them
together would ask themselves curiously why she had chosen me. To one
and all of them,--to Miss Mitty, to Bonny Page, to Dr. Theophilus,--the
mystery, I felt, was as obscure to-day as it had been in the beginning
of our love. Why was it? I questioned angrily, and wherein lay the
subtle distinction which divided my nature from George Bolingbroke's and
even from Sally's? The forces of democracy had made way for me, and yet
was there something stronger than democracy--and this something, fine
and invincible as a blade, I had felt long ago in the presence of Miss
Mitty and Miss Matoaca. Over my head, under the spreading boughs of the
sycamore, a window was lifted, and between the parted lace curtains, the
song of Miss Mitty's canary floated out into the street. As the music
entered my thoughts, I remembered suddenly the box of sweet alyssum
blooming on the window-sill under the swinging cage, and there flashed
into my consciousness the meaning of the flowers George had laid beside
Sally's plate. For her sake he had gone to Miss Mitty in the sad old
house, and that little blossom was the mute expression of a service he
had rendered joyfully in the name of love. The gratitude in Sally's eyes
was made clear to me, and a helpless rage at my own blindness, my own
denseness, flooded my heart. George, because of some inborn fineness of
perception, had discerned the existence of a sorrow in my wife to which
I, the man whom she loved and who loved her, had been insensible. He had
understood and had comforted--while I, engrossed in larger matters, had
gone on my way unheeding and indifferent. Then the anger against myself
turned blindly upon George, and I demanded passionately if he would
stand forever in my life as the embodiment of instincts and perceptions
that the generations had bred? Would I fail forever in little things
because I had been cursed at birth by an inability to see any except big
ones? And where I failed would George be always ready to fill the
unspoken need and to bestow the unasked-for sympathy?