He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that
some men, many men, went to marriage with certain
reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and begin
again. He had a man’s understanding of
such concealments. But he did not for a moment
compare his situation with theirs, even when the temptation
to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere
misconduct, but something hidden and perhaps terrible
lay behind David’s strange new attitude.
Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried
to analyze with professional detachment. The
mind in such cases set up its defensive machinery
of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but against
the unbearable.
For the last day or two he had faced the fact that,
not only must he use every endeavor to revive his
past, but that such revival threatened with cruelty
and finality to separate him from the present.
With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared
about the office. This place was his; he had
fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost
physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag
him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth.
And of himself holding desperately to them all, and
to the believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.
He shook himself and began to read the letter.
“Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you,
but understand you are laid up. Burn this as
soon as you’ve read it. Louis Bassett has
started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person
we discussed out of town as soon as possible.
Bassett is up to mischief. I’m not signing
this fully, for obvious reasons. G.”
The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town,
a long, rather low white house on Italian lines.
In summer, until the family exodus to the Maine Coast,
the brilliant canopy which extended out over the terrace
indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family
was “in residence.” Originally designed
as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it the year
round. There was nothing there, as there was
in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days
before her widowhood.
She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her
house and of no taste whatever in her clothing.
“I never know,” said Harrison Miller,
“when I look up at the Sayre place, whether
I’m seeing Ann Sayre or an awning.”
She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but
she was kindly in the main, tolerant and maternal.
She liked young people, gave gay little parties to
which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors
and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked,
and was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady
girl and settled down. Between her son and herself
was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She
viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion
about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about
him. She had no idea that she knew all that
he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the
veil of his private life.
