Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/564

518 sole interest was the question "whether or not one certain man would find ways and means to be there." The stimulants of high living, the round of false duties, created to keep her from thinking of the great and solemn ones neglected, whipped her blood to unreasonable speed. She confessed the constant need of a new sensation, in order that reality should not force her to reply to the questions—Whether her life were justified? Whether they were overspending?

They were too poor—this was the tragic reason given for their childless state. Too poor to allow themselves the luxury of children, the only luxury denied! Too busy for the leisure of parenthood. And natural forces, unsatisfied nature, sought outlet in sterile occupations and unfruitful interests.

The fact that she was in no wise a woman of home, a solacer and life-giver, made her antagonistic to her husband. She felt culpable, and she wanted to forget. The generous nature of the man never reproached her, and therefore she began to reproach herself. She played fast and loose at the gate of life to exorcise a spectre which at times, too real to be laughed down, stood at her bedside and regarded her with accusing eyes.

Delevan, so nearly Amory's rival in past days, was her constant companion. He boasted qualities of mind which Callender undoubtedly lacked. He was a man of leisure with plenty of time to follow the interests which to Mrs. Callender represented the realities of life.

Day after day they handled together the subjects of the times, Edith intellectually at her best under his stimulus. But gradually the man and woman, from wider impersonal topics, narrowed their ideals to the number of two; they generalized from dual experience, they contracted circles pretentiously far-reaching in the beginning. They resented the intrusion of a third. It was understood that when Mr. Delevan came, Mrs. Callender was no longer at home to another guest. Talking in lowered voices—or silent—they sat together for hours, the man assured, never for a moment doubting his victory or questioning his own sentiments; the woman, uncertain, excited perilously, carried a rudderless ship to the mid-seas.

Callender meanwhile bowed himself under life—an Atlas holding on his bended shoulders the gilded ball of ostentatious living. He did not feel its weight; his eyes, if downcast, regarded a beloved image, on which, even in this humiliating posture, he could gaze his fill.

There is no word, possibly, that falls with an uglier ring to the devotee of luxury and high living than "Economy."

The worldlings' epistles read, "To economize we are ashamed." Amory would as soon have asked his wife to inhabit with him a farm in western Illinois at once as to have suggested economy. On his daily pilgrimage home, struggling with thousands of fellow men to board an Elevated train in the snow and sleet of January, or blockaded in a motor-cab caught in the vortex of Broadway, he mused on the complicated state of affairs. He was a moral coward before the thought of causing his wife anxiety. If he failed in the sole role he had seemed fitted to fill, he would indeed be worthy her contempt!

He withdrew into himself, away even from his own friends, and redoubled his efforts to keep the pace; and his keenest effort was that she should not guess his unrest. When he came home late toward six o'clock, it grew habit with him to go at once to a little room designated as "Mr. Callender's study," a small library on the floor with the drawing-rooms. Here without light he would often sit before the table, his head in his hands, listening to the noises of the household of which he was master. The general telephone just without his door was in constant demand. When countless messages had been given and repeated, and the instrument fell for the time being into disuse, there were still varieties of other sounds: the rustling skirts of the maids, the hum of a distant sewing-machine in an upstairs room.

As he mused, overstrained, exhausted, the fibre and vitality of him spent for that which in return is no life or vitality, the sounds grew unbearable, until mercifully a complete silence ensued, when every one had rustled past and the house for a few moments was still. Then his imagination (no doubt