"Always like this, at home," he said slowly.

"It _is_ rather sweet." Her voice had the gentleness of water running into water. Her eyes looked at him once and left him deliberately but not as if they didn't care. It must have been a love-match in the beginning then--her eyes seemed so infirm.

"You'll read a little?"

"Yes."

"Home," he said. He seemed queerly satisfied to say the word, queerly moved as if even after so much reality had been lived through together, he couldn't quite believe that it was reality.

"And I've been waiting for it--five days, six days, this time?"

She must have been at the seash.o.r.e after all--tan or lack of it meant little these days, especially to a woman who lived in this kind of an apartment. The third conclusion might have been rather sentimental, a t.i.tle out of a moving picture--something about Even in the Wastes of the Giant City the Weary Heart Will Always Turn To--Just Home.

A doll on a small table began to buzz mysteriously in its internals. The man released the woman's hand--both looking deeply annoyed.

"I thought we had a private number here," said the man, the tiredness coming back into his face like scribbles on parchment.

She crossed to the telephone with a charming furtiveness--you could see she was playing they had just been found behind the piano together in a game of hide-and-seek. The doll was disembowelled of its telephone.

"No--No--Oh very well--"

"What was it?"

She smiled.

"Is this the Eclair Picture Palace?" she mimicked. [Ill.u.s.tration: THE TIREDNESS THAT HAD BEEN IN THE MAN'S FACE BEGAN TO LEAVE IT] Both seemed almost childishly relieved. So in spite of his successful-business-man mouth, he wasn't the kind that is less a husband than a telephone-receiver, especially at home. Still, she would have made a difference even to telephone-receivers, that could be felt even without the usual complement of senses.

"That was--bothersome for a minute." His tone lent the words a quaint accent of scare.

"Oh, well--if you have one at all--the way the service is now--"

"There won't be any telephone when we take our vacation together, that's _settled_."

She had been kneeling, examining a bookcase for books. Now she turned with one in her hand, her hair ruddy and smooth as ruddy amber in the reflected light.

"No, but _telegrams_. And wireless," she whispered mockingly, the more mockingly because it so obviously made him worried as a worried boy.

She came over and stood smoothing his ear a moment, a half-unconscious customary gesture, no doubt, for he relaxed under it and the look of rest came back. Then she went to her chair, sat down and opened the book.

"No use borrowing trouble now, dear. Now listen. Cigar?" "Going."

"Ashtray?"

"Yes."

"And remember not to knock it over when you get excited. Promise?"

"Um."

"Very well."

Mrs. Severance's even voice began to flow into the stillness.

"As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt--"

XXI

"And that's the end of the chapter." Mrs. Severance's voice trailed off into silence. She closed the book with a soft sound. The man whom it might be rather more convenient than otherwise to call Mr. Severance opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, but he had found by a good deal of experience that he paid more attention to d.i.c.kens if he closed his eyes while she read.

"Thank you dear."

"Thank you. You know I love it. Especially Pip."

He considered.

"There was a word one of my young men used the other day about d.i.c.kens.

Gusto, I think--yes, that was it. Well, I find that, as I grow older, that seems to be the thing I value rather more than most men of my age.

Gusto." He smiled "Though I take it more quietly, perhaps,--than I did when I was young," he added.

"You _are_ young" said Mrs. Severance carefully.

"Not really, dear. I can give half-a-dozen youngsters I know four strokes in nine holes and beat them. I can handle the bank in half the time and with half the worry that some of my people take to one department. And for a little while more, Rose, I may be able to satisfy you. But" and he pa.s.sed a hand lightly over his hair. "It's grey, you know," he ended.

"As if it mattered," said Mrs. Severance, a little pettishly.

"It does matter, Rose." His eyes darkened with memory--with the sort of memory that hurts more to forget than even to remember. "Do you realize that I am sixteen years older than you are?" he said a little hurriedly as if he were trying to scribble the memory over with any kind of words.

"But my dear" and she smiled, "you were sixteen years older six years ago--remember? There's less real difference between us now than there was then."

"Yes, I certainly wasn't as young in some ways--six years ago." He seemed to speak almost as if unconsciously, almost as if the words were being squeezed out of him in sleep by a thing that had pressed for a long time with a steady weight on his mind till the mind must release itself or be broken. "But then n.o.body could be with you, for a month even, and not feel himself turn younger whether he wanted to or not."

"So that's settled." She was trying to carry it lightly, to take the darkness out of his eyes. "And once you've bought our steamer tickets we can leave it all behind at the wharf and by the time we land we'll be so disgracefully young that no one will recognize us--just think--we can keep going back and back till I'm putting my hair up for the first time and you're in little short trousers--and then babies, I suppose and the other side of getting born--" but her voice, for once, turned ineffectually against his centeredness of gaze, that seemed now as if it had turned back on itself for a struggling moment and regarded neither what was nor what might be, but only what was past.

"Six years ago" he said with the same drowsy thoughtfulness. "Well, Rose, I shall always be--most grateful--for those six years."

She started to speak but he checked her.

"I think I would be willing to make a substantial endowment to any Protestant Church that still really believed in h.e.l.l," he said, "because that was very like h.e.l.l--six years ago."

Intensity began to come into his voice like a color of darkness, though he still spoke slowly.

"You can stand nearly everything in life but being tired of yourself.

And six years ago I was tired--tired to death."

Her hand reached over and touched him medicinally.

"I suppose I had no right" he began again and then stopped. "No, I think the strong man tires less easily but more wholly than the weak one when he does tire. And I was strong enough.