He had not undressed, and he sat beside the table,
smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper.
Upon his forehead the lines in that old pattern, the
historical map of his troubles, had grown a little
vaguer lately; relaxed by the complacency of a man
who not only finds his health restored, but sees the
days before him promising once more a familiar routine
that he has always liked to follow.
As his wife came in, closing the door behind her,
he looked up cheerfully, “Well, mother,”
he said, “what’s the news downstairs?”
“That’s what I came to tell you,”
she informed him, grimly.
Adams lowered his newspaper to his knee and peered
over his spectacles at her. She had remained
by the door, standing, and the great greenish shadow
of the small lamp-shade upon his table revealed her
but dubiously. “Isn’t everything
all right?” he asked. “What’s
the matter?”
“Don’t worry: I’m going to
tell you,” she said, her grimness not relaxed.
“There’s matter enough, Virgil Adams.
Matter enough to make me sick of being alive!”
With that, the markings on his brows began to emerge
again in all their sharpness; the old pattern reappeared.
“Oh, my, my!” he lamented. “I
thought maybe we were all going to settle down to a
little peace for a while. What’s it about
now?”
“It’s about Alice. Did you think
it was about me or anything for myself?”
Like some ready old machine, always in order, his
irritability responded immediately and automatically
to her emotion. “How in thunder could
I think what it’s about, or who it’s for?
Say it, and get it over!”
“Oh, I’ll ‘say’ it,”
she promised, ominously. “What I’ve
come to ask you is, How much longer do you expect
me to put up with that old man and his doings?”
“Whose doings? What old man?”
She came at him, fiercely accusing. “You
know well enough what old man, Virgil Adams!
That old man who was here the other night.”
“Mr. Lamb?”
“Yes; ‘Mister Lamb!’” She
mocked his voice. “What other old man
would I be likely to mean except J. A. Lamb?”
“What’s he been doing now?” her
husband inquired, satirically. “Where’d
you get something new against him since the last time
you——”
“Just this!” she cried. “The
other night when that man was here, if I’d known
how he was going to make my child suffer, I’d
never have let him set his foot in my house.”
Adams leaned back in his chair as though her absurdity
had eased his mind. “Oh, I see,”
he said. “You’ve just gone plain
crazy. That’s the only explanation of such
talk, and it suits the case.”
“Hasn’t that man made us all suffer every
day of our lives?” she demanded. “I’d
like to know why it is that my life and my children’s
lives have to be sacrificed to him?”
“How are they ‘sacrificed’ to him?”
