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<h2> V </h2>
<p>The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed
no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness
of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda
bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was
prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random—amid laughing
counter-charges of incompetence—had shot up in fragrant defiance of
their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings
about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson
rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze
shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, could
be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did
the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it
would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the
flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda-rail.</p>
<p>The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and
each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too
closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet
was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.</p>
<p>His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have
grown opaque.</p>
<p>"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.</p>
<p>"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had thrown
himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You've had a visitor?" he
commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.</p>
<p>"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.</p>
<p>"Flamel? Again?"</p>
<p>She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is
down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
here."</p>
<p>Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a sail with him
next Sunday."</p>
<p>Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most
natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from
the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do you want
to?"</p>
<p>"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of
indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had
taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting
merely his own conception of what lay behind it.</p>
<p>"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her
tea, she returned the feminine answer—"I thought you did."</p>
<p>"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
magnify Flamel's importance by hovering about the topic. "A sail would be
rather jolly; let's go."</p>
<p>She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which he
had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out
his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye
down the list of stocks and Flamel's importunate personality receded
behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
bearers of good news. Glennard's investments were flowering like his
garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
awaited his sickle.</p>
<p>He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good
luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. "Things are looking
uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three
months next winter if we can find something cheap."</p>
<p>She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of
balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby's account I shall be
almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate Erskine's house... she'll let
us have it for almost nothing...."</p>
<p>"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on in
search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.</p>
<p>"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next
week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR...."</p>
<p>He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her
pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little over
the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and
shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge
hid their neighbor's gables, giving them undivided possession of their
leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of
ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers.
Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was a
relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though
they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of
hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of
danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of
rescue....</p>
<p>He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks,
spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting them to
Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had
dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we
relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of
undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail
with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After
that, he argued, his first duty was to her—she had become his
conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's adroit
manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful venture,
already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard's professional
earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it
appear the expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the
mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review or two and have a few
flowers on the dinner-table. And already in a small way Glennard was
beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had
passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name
of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly
invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a
man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over
other people's money.</p>
<p>But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife's happiness that
Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new
life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore
to a husband's pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the
atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of
opportunity. And somehow—in the windowless inner cell of his
consciousness where self-criticism cowered—Glennard's course seemed
justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?</p>
<p>Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger gathered
at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not knowing what
he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his
wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly
given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his punishment
henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman
he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as
though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always
wanted—to be with him—and she had gained her point at last....</p>
<p>He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman
whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity—"Any news?"</p>
<p>"No—none—" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The
papers lay scattered at his feet—what if she were to see them? He
stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the
futility of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every
day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her
seeing it? He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and
what if she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were
that she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element
of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and
he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He laughed
aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance, decidedly.</p>
<p>"What are you laughing at?" she asked.</p>
<p>He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an
old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn't
find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story
seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He
glanced at his watch, "Isn't it time to dress?"</p>
<p>She rose with serene reluctance. "It's a pity to go in. The garden looks
so lovely."</p>
<p>They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in
it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, "If we mean to go on
the yacht next Sunday," she suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr. Flamel
know?"</p>
<p>Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him
know. You always seem to imply that I'm going to do something rude to
Flamel."</p>
<p>The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus leaving
one space in which to contemplate one's folly at arm's length. Glennard
turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before
his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded
the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very
bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the
two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.</p>
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