 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
VIII
Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on
the porch, and even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking
of the heart that these three years had taken their
toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint
skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed
him.
Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar
with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph
of himself in uniform taken just before the war.
"Good Lord!" he said aloud. The process was continuing.
There was no doubt of it—he looked now like
a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy—he
was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped
that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age
in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked
his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His
destiny seemed to him awful, incredible.
When he came down-stairs Hildegarde was waiting
for him. She appeared annoyed, and he wondered if
she had at last discovered that there was something
amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between
them that he broached the matter at dinner in
what he considered a delicate way.
"Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I
look younger than ever."
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed.
"Do you think it's anything to boast about?"
"I'm not boasting," he asserted uncomfortably.
She sniffed again. "The idea," she said, and after a
moment: "I should think you'd have enough pride to
stop it."
"How can I?" he demanded.
"I'm not going to argue with you," she retorted.
"But there's a right way of doing things and a wrong
way. If you've made up your mind to be different
from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you,
but I really don't think it's very considerate."
"But, Hildegarde, I can't help it."
"You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think
you don't want to be like any one else. You always have
been that way, and you always will be. But just think
you do—what would the world be like?"
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument
Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm
began to widen between them. He wondered what possible
fascination she had ever exercised over him.
To add to the breach, he found, as the new century
gathered headway, that his thirst for gayety grew
stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of
Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest
of the young married women, chatting with the most
popular of the débutantes, and finding their company
charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat
among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and
now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful
eyes.
"Look!" people would remark. "What a pity! A
young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He
must be twenty years younger than his wife." They had
forgotten—as people inevitably forget—that back in
1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about
this same ill-matched pair.
Benjamin's growing unhappiness at home was compensated
for by his many new interests. He took up
golf and made a great success of it. He went in for
dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at "The Boston," and
in 1908 he was considered proficient at the "Maxixe,"
while in 1909 his "Castle Walk" was the envy of every
young man in town.
His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent
with his business, but then he had worked hard at
wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that
he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had
recently graduated from Harvard.
He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each
fear which had come over him on his return
from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a
naïve pleasure in his appearance. There was only one
fly in the delicious ointment—he hated to appear in
public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty,
and the sight of her made him feel absurd. . . .
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