Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/563

517 gentle, than he had ever seen her. His heart leaped with a hope so sweet that his eyes filmed as he gazed at her. He almost took her in his arms without speaking. It would have been well had he done so. He was victor then.

The only man whom he had fancied he had cause to fear as a rival was yachting on the Mediterranean, and, to her friends' astonishment and their worldly approval, the news was rumored that Miss Van Alsten was to become Mrs. Amory Callender.

She intended to set up an establishment on a par with those of her intimate friends. Some of the incomes represented by these households went into the millions. In order to duplicate luxury his wife could not do without, the husband threw himself into the struggle for greater wealth. He had bought his wife, and he was working to keep her? Such a view of the situation was remote from his mind Rather she had done him the grace to bear his name, and he was working to make her happy. Happiness—as represented by a modern palace between two party walls conjoint with millions, a well-equipped stable, a house at Newport, a shooting-box in Georgia, a hunting-box at Hempstead, the latest model of automobiles—was Mrs. Callender's.

In her brougham, shut in by its heavy little windows, looking out at the pedestrians wrestling with wind and weather, her hands warmly held in her sable muff, her knees under her sable rug, she contrasted her suburban fortunes and entries to town with her present. Her weary foot expeditions hither and thither in clothes either too good for the streets or undesirable for a tea or reception, expenditures on hansoms sorely felt by a small allowance, courses in the carriages of generous friends—she contrasted all with the delicious cradling- ease of her present lot. Leaning back with a sigh, she revelled in her possessions and devoutly thanked the fates. Through her élan of gratitude she was nearly in love with her husband.

Callender scarcely ever saw his wife. She inhabited another part of the house. He felt out of place in her exquisite rooms with their fragile furniture and delicate stuffs. He envied the gay flock of women friends whose erratic appearances fell always in the very few hours he had to spend at home. There were as well countless other disturbances: the telephone on a stand at her side, urgent messengers, notes written at all times for all manner of engagements. When, venturing into this network of fictitious interests, he tried to find his wife, she was either "just dressing," or "just going out," or "just resting." He withdrew farther and farther, tacitly relegating himself to his own apartments and their uninteresting masculine belongings.

He slept at home, ate a hasty breakfast alone at his table, and hurried down-town. He returned to a house either deserted, or filled with people whose sporting tastes he did not share. On the days when bridge was played, the place made him think of a gambling-room, and of that sport he had enough!

At dinner he watched his wife. Men leaned to her in evident appreciation of her attractions. Brilliant, capricious, she seemed to Amory a wonderful bird caught indeed by him, in the world's eyes his, but in reality more to her most distant friend than to her husband.

When on rare occasions they dined alone together she was distrait, or else offered topics either completely foreign to the banker, or on which he could have no opinions because he had no time to consider them. As she waited, in an attitude whose impatience he nervously felt, for response from him, he would desperately blunder in, endeavoring to meet intellectual requirements no less inexorable than the financial. These moments were fatal. He was afterwards likely to feel he had lost in one evening that which his week's success at the Exchange could not balance.

Mrs. Callender was finding her banquet for the most part Dead Sea apples, and hours of utter disgust and ennui were often the portion of the woman living for herself alone. Her excitements were the crowded streets through which her carriage made its difficult way at the height of the day; in the more complicated progress of her automobile in and out of the network of vehicles and the rush of the cars. Excitement was in her entries to overheated functions whose