“It’s not that, Bassett. I’m
afraid of the accursed thing. I might talk a
lot of rot about wanting to work with my hands.
I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, any more
than the next fellow. I might fool myself, too,
with thinking I could work better without any money
worries. But I’ve got to remember this.
It took work to make a man of me before, and it will
take work to keep me going the way I intend to go,
if I get my freedom.”
Sometime during the night Bassett saw that the light
was still burning by the davenport, and went in.
Dick was asleep with a volume of Whitman open on
his chest, and Bassett saw what he had been reading.
“You broken resolutions, you racking angers,
you short-lived ennuis; Ah, think not you shall finally
triumph, my real self has yet to come forth.
It shall march forth over-mastering, till all lie beneath
me, It shall stand up, the soldier of unquestioned
victory.”
Bassett took the book away and stood rereading the
paragraph. For the first time he sensed the
struggle going on at that time behind Dick’s
quiet face, and he wondered. Unquestioned victory,
eh? That was a pretty large order.
Leslie Ward had found the autumn extremely tedious.
His old passion for Nina now and then flamed up in
him, but her occasional coquetries no longer deceived
him. They had their source only in her vanity.
She exacted his embraces only as tribute to her own
charm, her youth, her fresh young body.
And Nina out of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping
piano, of chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing
and bridge and theater boxes, was a queen dethroned.
She did not read or think. She spent the leisure
of her mourning period in long hours before her mirror
fussing with her hair, in trimming and retrimming hats,
or in the fastidious care of her hands and body.
He was ashamed sometimes of his pitilessly clear analysis
of her. She was not discontented, save at the
enforced somberness of their lives. She had
found in marriage what she wanted; a good house, daintily
served; a man to respond to her attractions as a woman,
and to provide for her needs as a wife; dignity and
an established place in the world; liberty and privilege.
But she was restless. She chafed at the quiet
evenings they spent at home, and resented the reading
in which he took refuge from her uneasy fidgeting.
“For Heaven’s sake, Nina, sit down and
read or sew, or do something. You’ve been
at that window a dozen times.”
“I’m not bothering you. Go on and
read.”
When nobody dropped in she would go upstairs and spend
the hour or so before bedtime in the rites of cold
cream, massage, and in placing the little combs of
what Leslie had learned was called a water-wave.
