Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/38

 was a man of forty-nine who looked older, with a long horse-face like Aunt Cassie's—a face that was handsome in a tired, yellow sort of way—and small, round eyes the color of pale-blue porcelain. At the sight of Olivia the face took on a pouting expression of sourness. . . a look which she knew well as one that he wore when he meant to complain of something.

"You are sitting up very late," she observed quietly, with a deliberate air of having noticed nothing unusual.

"I was waiting to speak to you. I want to talk with you. Please sit down for a moment."

There was an odd sense of strangeness in their manner toward each other, as if there had never been, even years before when the children were babies, any great intimacy between them. On his part there was, too, a sort of stiff and nervous formality, rather quaint and Victorian, and touched by an odd air of timidity. He was a man who would always do not perhaps the proper thing, but the thing accepted by his world as "proper."

It was the first time since morning that the conversation between them had emerged from the set pattern which it had followed day after day for so many years. When he said that he wanted to speak to her, it meant usually that there was some complaint to be made against the servants, more often than not against Higgins, whom he disliked with an odd, inexplicable intensity.

Olivia sat down, irritated that he should have chosen this hour when she was tired, to make some petty comment on the workings of the house. Half without thinking and half with a sudden warm knowledge that it would annoy him to see her smoking, she lighted a cigarette; and as she sat there, waiting until he had blotted with scrupulous care the page on which he had been writing, she became conscious slowly of a strange, unaccustomed desire to be disagreeable, to create