“Oh, I’m not going,” Archer answered.
“Not going? Why, what’s happened?”
Her voice was as clear as a bell, and full of wifely
solicitude.
“The case is off—postponed.”
“Postponed? How odd! I saw a note
this morning from Mr. Letterblair to Mamma saying
that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big
patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme
Court. You said it was a patent case, didn’t
you?”
“Well—that’s it: the whole
office can’t go. Letterblair decided to
go this morning.”
“Then it’s not postponed?”
she continued, with an insistence so unlike her that
he felt the blood rising to his face, as if he were
blushing for her unwonted lapse from all the traditional
delicacies.
“No: but my going is,” he answered,
cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given
when he had announced his intention of going to Washington,
and wondering where he had read that clever liars give
details, but that the cleverest do not. It did
not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as
to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected
him.
“I’m not going till later on: luckily
for the convenience of your family,” he continued,
taking base refuge in sarcasm. As he spoke he
felt that she was looking at him, and he turned his
eyes to hers in order not to appear to be avoiding
them. Their glances met for a second, and perhaps
let them into each other’s meanings more deeply
than either cared to go.
“Yes; it is awfully convenient,”
May brightly agreed, “that you should be able
to meet Ellen after all; you saw how much Mamma appreciated
your offering to do it.”
“Oh, I’m delighted to do it.”
The carriage stopped, and as he jumped out she leaned
to him and laid her hand on his. “Good-bye,
dearest,” she said, her eyes so blue that he
wondered afterward if they had shone on him through
tears.
He turned away and hurried across Union Square, repeating
to himself, in a sort of inward chant: “It’s
all of two hours from Jersey City to old Catherine’s.
It’s all of two hours—and it may
be more.”
His wife’s dark blue brougham (with the wedding
varnish still on it) met Archer at the ferry, and
conveyed him luxuriously to the Pennsylvania terminus
in Jersey City.
It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps
were lit in the big reverberating station. As
he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington
express, he remembered that there were people who
thought there would one day be a tunnel under the
Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania
railway would run straight into New York. They
were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise
predicted the building of ships that would cross the
Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine,
lighting by electricity, telephonic communication
without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.
