“Bartley! Bartley Hubbard!” she exclaimed;
“let me go,—let me go, this instant!
I never heard of such a shameless thing!”
But she really made no effort to escape.
The house seemed too little for Marcia’s happiness,
and after dinner she did not let Bartley forget his
last night’s engagement. She sent him off
to get his horse at the hotel, and ran up to her room
to put on her wraps for the drive. Her mother
cleared away the dinner things; she pushed the table
to the side of the room, and then sat down in her feather-cushioned
chair and waited her husband’s pleasure to speak.
He ordinarily rose from the Sunday dinner and went
back to his office; to-day he had taken a chair before
the stove. But he had mechanically put his hat
on, and he wore it pushed off his forehead as he tilted
his chair back on its hind legs, and braced himself
against the hearth of the stove with his feet.
A man is master in his own house generally through
the exercise of a certain degree of brutality, but
Squire Gaylord maintained his predominance by an enlightened
absenteeism. No man living always at home was
ever so little under his own roof. While he was
in more active business life, he had kept an office
in the heart of the village, where he spent all his
days, and a great part of every night; but after he
had become rich enough to risk whatever loss of business
the change might involve, he bought this large old
square house on the border of the village, and thenceforth
made his home in the little detached office.
If Mrs. Gaylord had dimly imagined that she should
see something more of him, having him so near at hand,
she really saw less: there was no weather, by
day or night, in which he could not go to his office,
now. He went no more than his wife into the village
society; she might have been glad now and then of
a little glimpse of the world, but she never said so,
and her social life had ceased, like her religious
life. Their house was richly furnished according
to the local taste of the time; the parlor had a Brussels
carpet, and heavy chairs of mahogany and hair-cloth;
Marcia had a piano there, and since she had come home
from school they had made company, as Mrs. Gaylord
called it, two or three times for her; but they had
held aloof from the festivity, the Squire in his office,
and Mrs. Gaylord in the family room where they now
sat in unwonted companionship.
“Well, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife, “I
don’t know as you can say but what Marcia’s
suited well enough.”
This was the first allusion they had made to the subject,
but she let it take the argumentative form of her
cogitations.
“M-yes,” sighed the Squire, in long, nasal
assent, “most too well, if anything.”
He rasped first one unshaven cheek and then the other,
with his thin, quivering hand.
“He’s smart enough,” said Mrs. Gaylord,
as before.
