Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/489

Rh It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put it, his social pleasures homœopathically. Certain of his friends explained the change by saying that he had never been “quite the same” since his daughter’s death; while others found its determining cause in the shock of Amherst’s second marriage. But this insinuation Mr. Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband one afternoon on his return from the mills.

She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel’s vision of “something lovely in Louis Seize,” but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered ﬂowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each other.

Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well her bright head, with its ﬂame-like play of meanings, ﬁtted into the background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details, he [ 473 ]