Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/198

Rh forget painful sights when they were not under her eye. This was perhaps—half-consciously—one of the reasons why she avoided Hanaford; why, as Amherst exclaimed, they had been everywhere since their marriage but to the place where their obligations called them. There had, at any rate, always been some good excuse for not returning there, and consequently for postponing the work of improvement which, it was generally felt, her husband could not fitly begin till she had returned and gone over the ground with him. After their marriage, and especially in view of the comment excited by that romantic incident, it was impossible not to yield to her wish that they should go abroad for a few months; then, before her conﬁnement, the doctors had exacted that she should be spared all fatigue and worry; and after the baby’s death Amherst had felt with her too tenderly to venture an immediate return to unwelcome questions.

For by this time it had become clear to him that such questions were, and always would be, unwelcome to her. As the easiest means of escaping them, she had once more dismissed the whole problem to the vague and tiresome sphere of “business,” whence he had succeeded in detaching it for a moment in the early days of their union. Her ﬁrst husband—poor unappreciated Westmore!—had always spared her the boredom of “business,” and Halford Gaines and Mr. Tredegar [ 182 ]