As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness
seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning
so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in
the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble
into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable
now except under the influence of liquor, and as he
seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s
soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed
out all night, as he did several times, she not only
failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of relief.
Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would
remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed
he was drinking a little too much.
For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair
that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of
stupor—even his interest in reading his
favorite books seemed to have departed, and though
an incessant bickering went on between husband and
wife, the one subject upon which they ever really
conversed was the progress of the will case. What
Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what
she expected that great gift of money to bring about,
is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by
her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife.
She who until three years before had never made coffee,
prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked
a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evenings
she read—books, magazines, anything she
found at hand. If now she wished for a child,
even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind
drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign
of interest in children. It is doubtful if she
could have made it clear to any one what it was she
wanted, or indeed what there was to want—a
lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind
some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with
her beauty.
One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along
Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer’s,
entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor
in a state of aggravated nervousness. The feverish
eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines
that reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment
she received the impression that he was suddenly and
definitely old.
“Have you any money?” he inquired of her
precipitately.
“What? What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. Money! Money!
Can’t you speak English?”
She paid no attention but brushed by him and into
the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box.
When his drinking had been unusually excessive he
was invariably in a whining mood. This time he
followed her and, standing in the pantry door, persisted
in his question.
“You heard what I said. Have you any money?”
She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.
“Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know
I haven’t any money—except a dollar
in change.”
