Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/191



ND yet, contrarily, Fay found in this perfect retrospect ground for forebodings. George, on the other hand, was unreservedly optimistic. His wife and his business were both together now, he could devote himself to each without robbing either.

Feeling this way about carrying his wife into his business, George felt not the slightest compunction about carrying his business into his home. As he sank deep in a luxuriously cushioned chair, lulled by Fay's low, strumming reveries at the piano, as he sat opposite her at meals, as he went with her complaisantly to golf or dinners or the theater, his business went always with him. He went into abstractions over it and came out to tell her enthusiastically at length, or monosyllabically in brief, jerky sentences, things that he had thought, ideas that had come to him; and then relapsed into others.

But Fay soon ceased to regard these as forgivable eccentricities. She found in them signs that business was absorbing him more and more completely, and began to feel the worm of resentment gnawing. In some ways she saw less