II
For a week he was attentive to his wife, took her to the
theater, to dinner at the Littlefields'; then the old weary dodging
and shifting began and at least two evenings a week he
spent with the Bunch. He still made pretense of going to the
Elks and to committee-meetings but less and less did he
trouble to have his excuses interesting, less and less did she
affect to believe them. He was certain that she knew he was
associating with what Floral Heights called "a sporty crowd,''
yet neither of them acknowledged it. In matrimonial geography
the distance between the first mute recognition of a
break and the admission thereof is as great as the distance
between the first naive faith and the first doubting.
As he began to drift away he also began to see her as a
human being, to like and dislike her instead of accepting her
as a comparatively movable part of the furniture, and he
compassionated that husband-and-wife relation which, in twenty-five
years of married life, had become a separate and real
entity. He recalled their high lights the summer vacation
in Virginia meadows under the blue wall of the mountains;
their motor tour through Ohio, and the exploration of Cleveland,
Cincinnati, and Columbus; the birth of Verona; their
building of this new house, planned to comfort them through
a happy old age—chokingly they had said that it might be
the last home either of them would ever have. Yet his most
softening remembrance of these dear moments did not keep
him from barking at dinner, "Yep, going out f' few hours.
Don't sit up for me.''
He did not dare now to come home drunk, and though he
rejoiced in his return to high morality and spoke with gravity
to Pete and Fulton Bemis about their drinking, he prickled
at Myra's unexpressed criticisms and sulkily meditated that
a "fellow couldn't ever learn to handle himself if he was
always bossed by a lot of women.''
He no longer wondered if Tanis wasn't a bit worn and
sentimental. In contrast to the complacent Myra he saw her
as swift and air-borne and radiant, a fire-spirit tenderly stooping
to the hearth, and however pitifully he brooded on his
wife, he longed to be with Tanis.
Then Mrs. Babbitt tore the decent cloak from her unhappiness
and the astounded male discovered that she was
having a small determined rebellion of her own.