“Common—common where?”
he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness:
“Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room.
Those people are always awkward in society.
But then,” she added disarmingly, “I
suppose I shouldn’t have known if he was clever.”
Archer disliked her use of the word “clever”
almost as much as her use of the word “common”;
but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell
on the things he disliked in her. After all,
her point of view had always been the same.
It was that of all the people he had grown up among,
and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.
Until a few months ago he had never known a “nice”
woman who looked at life differently; and if a man
married it must necessarily be among the nice.
“Ah—then I won’t ask him to
dine!” he concluded with a laugh; and May echoed,
bewildered: “Goodness— ask
the Carfrys’ tutor?”
“Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys,
if you prefer I shouldn’t. But I did rather
want another talk with him. He’s looking
for a job in New York.”
Her surprise increased with her indifference:
he almost fancied that she suspected him of being
tainted with “foreignness.”
“A job in New York? What sort of a job?
People don’t have French tutors: what
does he want to do?”
“Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand,”
her husband retorted perversely; and she broke into
an appreciative laugh. “Oh, Newland, how
funny! Isn’t that French?”
On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled
for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish
to invite M. Riviere. Another after-dinner talk
would have made it difficult to avoid the question
of New York; and the more Archer considered it the
less he was able to fit M. Riviere into any conceivable
picture of New York as he knew it.
He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that
in future many problems would be thus negatively solved
for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his
wife’s long train into the house he took refuge
in the comforting platitude that the first six months
were always the most difficult in marriage.
“After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly
finished rubbing off each other’s angles,”
he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s
pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose
sharpness he most wanted to keep.
The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to
the big bright sea.
The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium
and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate
colour, standing at intervals along the winding path
that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia
and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.
