"MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:--
"I see that you're one of the folk who can be counted on. You
help Honora out of this and then tell me what I can do for
you. I'd get to her some way even with this miserable
plaster-of-Paris leg of mine if you weren't there. But I know
you'll play the cards right. Can't you come with her and stay
with her awhile till she's more used to the change? You'd be
as welcome as sunlight. But I don't even need to say that. I
saw you only a moment, yet I think you know that I'd count it
a rich day if I could see you again. You are one of those who
understand a thing without having it bellowed by megaphone.
"Don't mind my emphatic English. I'm upset. I feel like
murdering a man, and the sensation isn't pleasant. Using
language is too common out here to attract attention--even on
the part of the man who uses it. Oh, my poor Honora! Look
after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to
your own. It will make quite a sum. Yours faithfully,
"KARL WANDER."
"He wrote to you, too?" inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note.
"Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way."
"Shall I go?"
"What else offers?"
"Nothing," said Honora in her dead voice. "If I kept a diary, I would be
like that sad king of France who recorded '_Rien_' each day."
Kate made a practical answer.
"We must pack," she said.
"But the house--"
"Let it stand empty if the owner can't find a tenant. Pay your rent till
he does, if that's in the contract. What difference does all that make?
Get out where you'll have a chance to recuperate."
"Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall? How does a person recuperate from
shame?"
"There isn't really any shame to you in what others do," Kate said.
"But you--you'll have to go somewhere."
"So I shall. Don't worry about me. I shall take good care of myself."
Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner.
"I don't see how I'm going to go through with it all," she said,
shuddering.
So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was
begun. It was an ordeal--even a greater ordeal than they had thought it
would be. Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more
for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore
the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that
were severed.
Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony
of weeping on David's bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness
beside Honora's. Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate
knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great,
self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often
she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so
handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called
to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had
undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic
model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. Then,
after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities,
he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage.
Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora,
shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her
housewifely stores were kept.
"I don't suppose you can understand, dear," she moaned to Kate. "But
it's a sort of symbol--a linen-closet is. See, I hemmed all these things
with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!"
How could any one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were
getting the upper hand! She grew more feminine every hour. There was an
increasing rhythm in her movements--a certain rich solemnity like that
of Niobe or Hermione. Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and
festooned her statuesque shoulders. The severity of her usual attire
gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the
heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her
a tenderer beauty than she ever had had before. She was passionate
enough now to have suited even that avid man who had proved himself so
delinquent.
"If only David could have seen her like this!" mused Kate. "His
'Blue-eyed One' would have seemed tepid in comparison. To think she
submerged her splendor to so little purpose!"
She wondered if Honora knew how right Karl Wander had been in saying
that some one had blundered, and if she had gained so much enlightenment
that she could see that it was herself who had done so. She had
renounced the mistress qualities which the successful wife requires to
supplement her wifely character, and she had learned too late that love
must have other elements than the rigidly sensible ones.
Honora was turning to the little girls now with a fierce sense of
maternal possession. She performed personal services for them. She held
them in her arms at twilight and breathed in their personality as if it
were the one anaesthetic that could make her oblivious to her pain.