Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/315

Rh Frances did. So much nowadays seemed to point to dissatisfaction with him; the love itself, which she held before him like a clear flame, he began to question and to value as pity.

"If there is anything between us, Richard," said Frances, at the last, abruptly, "let us talk it out. You can say anything you like—you are, above all men I have ever known, able to tell things."

He could only give her his gaze appealingly. Keppel—and no one knew it better than he—was not of the kind that facilely "talks out" a situation based on a personal sense of incompetence. Besides, the fact of the ultimate justification of her position put him, when he looked the matter full in the eyes—less selfishly, less morbidly, than was his wont now tremendously in the wrong, made him seem smallish and peevish.

He evaded the opening clumsily:

"Oh, I'm just a little down in the mouth—it's the weather, I fancy." The evading of the chance she gave him was an added hurt, for he loved frankness above all.

It came in the end to a very bad state with Keppel and his wife. He left her blind, groping for reasons in the dark. And this hurt her pride in herself, and, too, in him. With his mental defection she had little to consider save the objective field, and that was crowded with her husband's relatives. He forced her to face a condition which had hitherto existed only in Keppel's fagged brain—the general fact of a mistake for them both in their marriage. Nothing had struck, as yet, at the root of their love; but they were in one of those inevitably dark periods of weariness, distrust, over-strained emotion, which, if not lighted with delicate understanding, results often in desperate measures for relief.

When Keppel had to tell her of the two-o'clock Sunday dinner his aunts in Brooklyn were planning largely to give them—as a domestic hostage to their matrimonial bliss,—Frances openly rebelled. "I have—indeed, we both have— an engagement for luncheon that day," she said, coldly. "Besides—"

"But it is only tentative—that engagement," he hazarded.

"I choose to make it decisive. I see no reason, Richard, why, for the sake of something that comes very near being a piece of illogical sentimentality on your part, we should drag ourselves to a barbarous two-o'clock meal with—why, you've laughed a hundred times at your Brooklyn aunts."

He met it doggedly. "They've planned it and they'll be—"

"Hurt, you're about to say? Very well, if it comes to the question of hurt feelings, my impression is that my own should be considered."

"Oh, Frances, you don't understand."

"No, I do not."

"I must go in any case," he finished, wretchedly, impelled on the instant to a disagreement, which afterward he bitterly repented.

"Oh, if you take it—and your aunts—so seriously!"

It was serious enough—and taking it so, or leaving it, made no alleviation. Frances, after all, had the better of it, for she had her own friends as a diversion, if not a refuge; and they also were the sort that Keppel most desired, but could not, in the present mess of things, avail himself of with any dignity.

Ultimately Keppel went alone to the dinner of his aunts.

The ensuing weeks brought Keppel—though in his saner moments he saw the absurdity of it—to a state of despondency which had for its nucleus the fact that he was hopelessly misunderstood. From misunderstanding him on one point, he grew to feel that Frances was missing him on every point. His morbid self-searchings left her still on her pedestal, and, like pedestalled beings, left her alone. The rarefied atmosphere of her elevation, it must be said, afforded her little satisfaction. She was almost at the point where her love was ready to admit its last effort was expended, its high courage daunted.

The outward show of things between them was well enough; their conversation was a graceful skipping from tussock to tussock in the swamp of unsaid things. After an evening of this ungrateful striding over unmentioned abysses, Keppel brought up the matter of the family gathering at Thanksgiving in his home—a day's journey distant in a weatherworn country village.