CHAPTER XXII
THE MAN AND THE CLASS
"I oughtn't to have done it, Benjy," said President, following me withdiffidence under the waving palm branches and up the staircase.
"Nonsense, President," I answered; "I'm awfully glad you've come. Onlyif I'd known about it, I'd have met you at the station."
"No, I oughtn't to have done it, Benjy," he repeated humbly, standing ina dejected attitude in the centre of the guest room next to Jessy's. Hehad entered nervously, as if he were stepping on glass, and when Imotioned to a chair he shook his head and glanced uneasily at thedelicate chintz covering.
"I'd better not sit down. I'm feared I'll hurt it."
"It's made to be sat in. You aren't going to stand up in the middle ofthe room all night, old fellow, are you?"
At this he appeared to hesitate, and a pathetic groping showed itself inhis large, good-humoured face.
"You see, I've been down in the mines," he said, "an' anything so fancymakes my flesh crawl."
"I wish you'd give up that work. It's a shame to have you do it whenI've got more money than I can find investments for."
"I'm a worker, Benjy, and I'll die a worker. Pa wa'nt a worker, andthat's why he took to drink."
"Well, sit down now, and make yourself at home. I've got to go backdownstairs, but I'll come up again the very minute that it's over."
Pushing him, in spite of his stubborn, though humble, resistance, intothe depths of the chintz-covered chair, I went hurriedly back to thedinner-table, and took my seat beside Mrs. Tyler, who remarked with atact which won me completely:--
"Mrs. Starr has been telling us such interesting things about yourbrother. He has a very fine head."
"By George, I'm glad I shook his hand," said the General, in his loud,kindly way. "Bring him to see me, Ben, I like a worker."
The terrible minute in which I had sat there, paralysed by the shame ofacknowledging him, was still searing my mind. As I met Sally's eyes overthe roses and lilies, I wondered if she had seen my cowardliness as Ihad seen Jessy's, and been repelled by it? When the dinner was over, andthe last guest had gone, I asked myself the question again while I wentupstairs to bring my brother from his retirement. As I opened the door,he started up from the chair in which I had placed him, and beganrubbing his eyes as he followed me timidly out of the room. At the tableSally seated herself opposite to him, and talked in her simple, kindlymanner while he ate his dinner.
"Pour his wine, Ben," she said, dismissing the butler, "there are toomany frivolities, aren't there? I like a clear space, too."
Turning toward him she pushed gently away the confusing decorations, andremoved the useless number of forks from beside his plate. If the way heate his soup and drank his wine annoyed her, there was no hint of it inher kind eyes and her untroubled smile. She, who was sensitive to thepoint of delicacy, I knew, watched him crumble his bread into his greenturtle, and gulp down his sherry, with a glance which apparently wasoblivious of the thing at which it looked. Jessy shrank gradually away,confessing presently that she had a headache and would like to goupstairs to bed; and when she kissed President's cheek, I saw aversionwritten in every line of her shrinking figure. Yet opposite to him satSally, who was a Bland and a Fairfax, and not a tremor, not the flickerof an eyelash, disturbed her friendly and charming expression. What wasthe secret of that exquisite patience, that perfect courtesy, which wasconfirmed by the heart, not by the lips? Did the hidden cause of it liein the fact that it was not a manner, after all, but the very essence ofa character, whose ruling spirit was exhaustless sympathy?
"I've told Benjy, ma'am," said President, selecting the largest fork bysome instinct for appropriateness, "that I know I oughtn't to have doneit."
"To have done what?" repeated Sally kindly.
"That I oughtn't to have come in on a party like that dressed as I am,and I so plain and uneddicated."
"You mustn't worry," she answered, bending forward in all thequeenliness of her braided wreath and her bare shoulders, "you mustn'tworry--not for a minute. It was natural that you should come to yourbrother at once, and, of course, we want you to stay with us."
I had never seen her fail when social intuition guided her, and she didnot fail now. He glanced down at his clothes in a pleased, yethesitating, manner.
"These did very well on Sunday in Pocahontas," he said, "but somehowthey don't seem to suit here; I reckon so many flowers and lights kindof dazzle my eyes."
"They do perfectly well," answered Sally, speaking in a firm, direct wayas if she were talking to a child; "but if you would feel morecomfortable in some of Ben's clothes, he has any number of them at yourservice. He is about your height, is he not?"
"To think of little Benjy growin' so tall," he remarked with a kind ofecstasy, and when we went into the library for a smoke, he insisted uponmeasuring heights with me against the ledge of the door. Then, alonewith me and the cheerful crackling of the log fire, his embarrassmentdisappeared, and he began to ask a multitude of eager questions aboutmyself and Jessy and my marriage.
"And so pa died," he remarked sadly, between the long whiffs of hispipe.
"I'm not sure it wasn't the best thing he ever did," I responded.
"Well, you see, Benjy, he wa'nt a worker, and when a man ain't a workerthere's mighty little to stand between him and drink. Now, ma, she was aworker."
"And we got it from her. That's why we hate to be idle, I suppose."
"Did it ever strike you, Benjy," he enquired solemnly, after a minute,"that in the marriage of ma and pa the breeches were on the wrong one of'em? Pa wa'nt much of a man, but he would have made a female that wecould have been proud of. With all the good working qualities, we nevercould be proud of ma when we considered her as a female."
"Well, I don't know, but I think she was the best we ever had."
"We are proud of Jessy," he pursued reflectively.
"Yes, we are proud of Jessy," I repeated, and as I uttered the words, Iremembered her beautiful blighted look, while she sat cold and silent,crumbling her bit of bread.
"And we are proud of you, Benjy," he added, "but you ain't anyparticular reason to be proud of me. You can't be proud of a man thatain't had an eddication."
"Well, the education doesn't make the man, you know."
"It does a good deal towards it. The stuffing goes a long way with thegoose, as poor ma used to say. Do you ever think what ma would have beenif she'd had an eddication? An eddication and breeches would have made ageneral of her. It must take a powerful lot of patience to stand beingborn a female."
He took a wad of tobacco from his pocket, eyed it timidly, and afterglancing at the tiled hearth, put it back again.
"You know what I would do if I were a rich man, Benjy?" he said; "I'dbuy a railroad."
"You'd have to be a very rich man, indeed, to do that."
"It's a little dead-beat road, the West Virginia and Wyanoke. Ioverheard two gentlemen talking about it yesterday in Pocahontas, andone of 'em had been down to look at those worked-out coal fields atWyanoke. 'If I wa'nt in as many schemes as I could float, I'd buy up acontrol of that road,' said the one who had been there, 'you mark mywords, there's better coal in those fields than has ever come out of'em.' They called him Huntley, and he said he'd been down with anexpert."
"Huntley?" I caught at the name, for he was one of the shrewdestpromoters in the South. "If he thinks that, why didn't he get control ofthe road himself?"
"The other wanted him to. He said the time would come when they tappedthe coal fields that the Great South Midland and Atlantic would want thelittle road as a feeder."
"So he believed the Wyanoke coal fields weren't worked out, eh?"
"He said they wa'nt even developed. You see it was all a secret, andthey didn't pay any attention to me, because I was just a common miner."
"And couldn't buy a railroad. Well, President, if it comes to anything,you shall have your share. Meanwhile, I'll run out to Wyanoke and lookaround."
With the id
ea still in my mind, I went into the General's office nextday, and told him that I had decided to accept the presidency of theUnion Bank.
"Well, I'm sorry to lose you, Ben. Perhaps you'll come back to the roadin another capacity when I am dead. It will be a bigger road then. We'rebuying up the Tennessee and Carolina, you know."
"It's a great road you've made, General, and I like to serve it. By theway, I'm going to West Virginia in a day or two to have a look at theWest Virginia and Wyanoke. What do you know of the coal fields atWyanoke?"
"No 'count ones. I wouldn't meddle with that little road if I were you.It will go bankrupt presently, and then we'll buy it, I suppose, at ourown price. It runs through scrub land populated by old field pines. Howis that miner brother of yours, Ben? I saw Sally at the theatre withhim. You've got a jewel, my boy, there's no doubt of that. When I lookedat her sailing down the room on his arm last night, by George, I wishedI was forty years younger and married to her myself."
Some hours later I repeated his remark to Sally, when I went home atdusk and found her sitting before a wood fire in her bedroom, with herhat and coat on, just as she had dropped there after a drive withPresident.
"Well, I wouldn't have the General at any age. You needn't be jealous,Ben," she responded. "I'm too much like Aunt Matoaca."
"He always said you were," I retorted, "but, oh, Sally, you are anangel! When I saw you rise at dinner last night, I wanted to squeeze youin my arms and kiss you before them all."
The little scar by her mouth dimpled with the old childish expression ofarchness.
"Suppose you do it now, sir," she rejoined, with the primness of MissMitty, and a little later, "What else was there to do but rise, youabsurd boy? Poor mamma used to tell me that grandpapa always said toher, 'When in doubt choose the kindest way.'"
"And yet he disinherited his favourite daughter."
"Which only proves, my dear, how much easier it is to make a proverbthan to practise it."
"Do you know, Sally," I began falteringly, after a minute, "there issomething I ought to tell you, and that is, that when I looked up at thetable last night and saw President in the doorway, my first feeling wasone of shame."
She rubbed her cheek softly against my sleeve.
"Shall I confess something just as dreadful?" she asked. "When I lookedup and saw him standing there my first feeling was exactly the same."
"Sally, I am so thankful."
"You wicked creature, to want me to be as bad as yourself."
"It couldn't have lasted with you but a second."
"It didn't, but a second is an hour in the mind of a snob."
"Well, we were both snobs together, and that's some comfort, anyway."
For the three days that President remained with us he wore my clothes,in which he looked more than ever like a miner attired for church, andcarried himself with a resigned and humble manner.
Sally took him to the theatre and to drive with her in the afternoon,and I carried him to the General's office and over the Capitol, which hesurveyed with awed and admiring eyes. Only Jessy still shrank from him,and not once during his visit were we able to prevail upon her to appearwith him in the presence of strangers. There was always an excuse readyto trip off her tongue--she had a headache, she was going to thedressmaker's, the milliner's, the dentist's even; and I honestly believethat she sought cheerfully this last place of torture as an escape. Tothe end, however, he regarded her with an affection that fell littleshort of adoration.
"Who'd have thought that little Jessy would have shot up into a regularbeauty!" he exclaimed for the twentieth time as he stood ready todepart. "She takes arter pa, and I always said the only thing against pawas that he wa'nt born a female."
He kissed her good-by in a reverential fashion, and after a cordial,though exhausted, leave-taking from Sally, we went together to WestVirginia. In spite of the General's advice, I had decided to take a lookat the coal fields of Wyanoke, and a week later, when I returned toRichmond, I was the owner of a control of the little West Virginia andWyanoke Railroad. It was a long distance from the presidency of theGreat South Midland and Atlantic, but I watched still from some vantageground in my imagination, the gleaming tracks of the big road sweepingstraight on to the southern horizon.
For the next few years there was hardly a shadow on the smiling surfaceof our prosperity. Society had received us in spite of my father, inspite even of my brother; and the day that had made me Sally's husbandhad given me a place, if an alien one, in the circle in which she moved.I was there at last, and it was neither her fault nor mine if I carriedwith me into that stained-glass atmosphere something of theconsciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at thekitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I feltvaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physicalpresence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hoveringuncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had neverlearned--would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to thepeople with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them whenbrought face to face with the fact of their absence. The lightness oflife taught me nothing except that I was built in mind and in body upona heavier plan. At the dinner-table, when the airy talk floated aboutme, I felt again and again that the sparkling trivialities settled likethistledown upon the solid mass I presented, and remained there becauseof my native inability to waft them back. It was still as impossible forme to entertain pretty girls in pink tarlatan as it had been on thenight of my first party; and the memory of that disastrous socialepisode stung me at times when I stood large and awkward before a gayand animated maiden, or sat wedged in, like a massive block, between twopatient and sleepy mothers. These people were all Sally's friends, notmine, and it was for her sake, I never forgot for a minute, that theyhad accepted me. With just such pleasant condescension they would stillhave accepted me, I knew, if I had, in truth, entered their company withmy basket of potatoes or carrots on my arm. One alone held outunwaveringly through the years; for Miss Mitty, shut with her pride andher portraits in the old grey house, obstinately closed her big mahoganydoors against our repeated friendly advances. Sometimes at dusk, as Ipassed on the crooked pavement under the two great sycamores, I wouldglance up at the windows, where the red firelight glimmered on the smallsquare panes, and fancy that I saw her long, oval face gazing down on mefrom between the parted lace curtains. But she made no sign offorgiveness, and when Sally went to see her, as she did sometimes, theold lady received her formally in the drawing-room, with a distant andstately manner. She, who was the mixture of a Bland and a Fairfax, satenthroned upon her traditions, while we of the common, outside worldwalked by under the silvery boughs of her sycamores.
"Aunt Mitty has told Selim not to admit me," said Sally one day atluncheon. "I know she wasn't out in this dreadful March wind--she neverleaves the house except in summer--and yet when I went there, he told mepositively she was not at home. When I think of her all alone hour afterhour with Aunt Matoaca's things around her, I feel as if it would breakmy heart. George says she is looking very badly."
"Does George see her?" I asked, glancing up from my cup of coffee, whileI waited for the light to a cigar. "I didn't imagine he had enoughattentions left over from his hunters to bestow upon maiden ladies."
The sugar tongs were in her hand, and she looked not at me, but at thelump of sugar poised above her cup, as she answered,
"He is so good."
"Good?" I echoed lightly; "do you call George good? The General thinkshe's a sad scamp."
The lump of sugar dropped with a splash into her cup, and her eyes weredark as she raised them quickly to my face. Instinctively I felt, with ablind groping of perception, that I had wounded her pride, or herloyalty, or some other hereditary attribute of the Blands and theFairfaxes that I could not comprehend.
"If I wanted an estimate of goodness, I don't think I'd go to theGeneral as an authority," she retorted.
"I'm sorry you never liked him, Sally. He's a gr
eat man."
"Well, he isn't _my_ great man anyway," she retorted. "I prefer Dr.Theophilus or George."
I laughed gayly. "The doctor is a mollycoddle and George is a fop." Mytone was jaunty, yet her words were like the prick of a needle in asensitive place. What was her praise of George except the confession ofan appreciation of the very things that I could never possess? I knewshe loved me and not George--was not her marriage a proof of thissufficient to cover a lifetime?--yet I knew also that the externalgraces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for herthe charm of habit, of association, of racial memory. Would the power inme that had captured her serve as well through a future of familiarpossession as it had served in the supreme moment of conquest? I couldnot go through life, as I had once said, forever pushing a wheel up ahill, and the strength of a shoulder might prove, after all, lesseffective in the freedom of daily intercourse than the quickness ordelicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered,the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in thefirst rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and of littleworth?
"There are worse things than a mollycoddle or a fop," she rejoined aftera pause, and added quickly, while old Esdras left the dining-room toanswer a ring at the bell, "That's either Bonny Page or George now. Oneof them is coming to take me out."
For a moment I hoped foolishly that the visitor might be Bonny Page, butthe sound of George's pleasant drawling voice was heard speaking to oldEsdras, and as the curtains swung back, he crossed the threshold andcame over to take Sally's outstretched hand.
"You're lunching late to-day," he said. "I don't often find you here atthis hour, Ben."
"No, I'm not a man-about-town like you," I replied, pushing the cigarsand the lamp toward him; "the business of living takes up too much of mytime."
He leaned over, without replying to me, his hand on the back of Sally'schair, his eyes on her face.
"It's all right, Sally," he said in a low voice, and when he drew back,I saw that he had laid a spray of sweet alyssum on the table beside herplate.
Her eyes shone suddenly as if she were looking at sunlight, and when shesmiled up at him, there was an expression in her face, half gratitude,half admiration, that made it very beautiful. While I watched her, Itried to overcome an ugly irrational resentment because George had beenthe one to call that tremulous new beauty into existence.
"How like you it was," she returned, almost in a whisper, with the sprayof sweet alyssum held to her lips, "and how can I thank you?"
His slightly wooden features, flushed now with a fine colour, as if hehad been riding in the March wind, softened until I hardly knew them.Standing there in his immaculate clothes, with his carefully groomedmustache hiding a trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, aGeorge with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as anacquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked intobeing, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened inGeorge, who had lost her, some quality--inscrutable and elusive--thatshe had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this qualitywas, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding,sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared tocontain and possess them all. The mere fact of its existence, and that Irecognised without explaining it, had the effect of a barrier whichseparated me for the moment from my wife and the man to whom she wasrelated by the ties of race and of class. Again I was aware of thatsense of strangeness, of remoteness, which I had felt on the night ofour home-coming when I had stood, spellbound, before Bonny Page'sexquisite grooming and the shining gloss on her hair and boots.Something--a trifle, perhaps, had passed between Sally and George--andthe reason I did not understand it was because I belonged to anotherorder and had inherited different perceptions from theirs. Thetrifle--whatever it was--appeared visibly, I knew, before us; it wasevident and on the surface, and if I failed to discern it what did thatprove except the shortness of the vision through which I looked? Aphysical soreness, like that of a new bruise, attacked my heart, andrising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out,leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat inthe hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to herlips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by thetenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she wasmine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keenercomprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not ofjealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curiouseccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush ofambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in thethings in which success was possible. If I could not give what Georgegave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better.When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, Ihad little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they hadalways done to the possession of power. Only let that power find itsfullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as theliving present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all,what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life,while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibrewoven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust.Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way totriumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to thedazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound upwith my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feelingfrom which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities ofmy position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passedthrough my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and keptme tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. Forpleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or anabsent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to thinkor to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar afterdinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bareshoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in NewYork, and during my absence, it never occurred to me to enquire how shefilled her long, empty days. She was sure of me, she trusted me, I knew;and in the future, I told myself when I had leisure to think of it--nextyear, perhaps--I should begin again to play the part of an ardent lover.She was as desirable--she was far dearer to me than she had ever been inher life, but while I held her safe and close in my clasp, my mindreached out with its indomitable energy after the uncertain, theunattained. I had my wife--what I wanted now was a fortune and a greatname to lay at her feet.
And all these months did she ever question, ever ask herself, while shewatched me struggling day after day with the lust for power, if thething that I sought to give her would in the end turn to Dead Sea fruitat her lips? Question she may have done in her heart, but no hint of itever reached me--no complaint of her marriage ever disturbed the outwardserenity in which we lived. Yet, deep in myself, I heard always a stillsmall voice, which told me that she demanded something far subtler andfiner than I had given--something that belonged inherently to the natureof George Bolingbroke rather than to mine. Even now, though she loved meand not George, it was George who was always free, who was alwaysamiable, who was always just ready and just waiting to be called. Onanother day, a month or two later, he came in again with his blossom ofsweet alyssum, and again her eyes grew shining and grateful, while theold bruise throbbed quickly to life in my heart.
"Is it all right still?" she asked, and he answered, "All right," withhis rare smile, which lent a singular charm to his softened features.
Then he glanced across at me and made, I realised, an effort to befriendly.
"You ought to get a horse, Ben," he remarked, "it would keep you fromgetting glum. If you'd hunted with us yesterday, you would have seenBonny Page take a gate like a bird."
"I tried to follow," said Sall
y, "but Prince Charlie refused."
"You mean I wouldn't let go your bridle," returned George, in ahalf-playful, half-serious tone.
The bruise throbbed again. Here, also, I was shut out--I who had carriedpotatoes to George's door while he was off learning to follow thehounds. His immaculate, yet careless, dress; the perfection of hismanner, which seemed to make him a part of the surroundings in which hestood; the very smoothness and slenderness of the hand that rested onSally's chair--all these produced in me a curious and unreasonablesensation of anger.
"I forbid you to jump, Sally," I said, almost sharply; "you know I hateit."
She leaned forward, glancing first at me and then at George, with anexpression of surprise.
"Why, what's the matter, Ben?" she asked. "He's a perfect bear, isn'the, George?"
"The best way to keep her from jumping," observed George, pleasantlyenough, though his face flushed, "is to be on the spot to catch herbridle or her horse's mane or anything else that's handy. It's the onlymeans I've found successful, for there was never a Bland yet who didn'tgo straight ahead and do the thing he was forbidden to. Miss Mitty toldme with pride that she had been eating lobster, which she always hated,and I discovered her only reason was that the doctor had ordered her notto touch it."
"Then I shan't forbid, I'll entreat," I replied, recovering myself withan effort. "Please don't jump, Sally, I implore it."
"I won't jump if you'll come with me, Ben," she answered.
I laughed shortly, for how was it possible to explain to two Virginiansof their blood and habits that a man of six feet two inches could notsit a horse for the first time without appearing ridiculous in the eyeseven of the woman who loved him? They had grown up together in thefields or at the stables, and a knowledge of horse-flesh was as much apart of their birthright as the observance of manners. The one I couldnever acquire; the other I had attained unaided and in the face of thetremendous barriers that shut me out. The repeated insistence upon thefact that Sally was a Bland aroused in me, whenever I met it, anirritation which I tried in vain to dispel. To be a Bland meant, afterall, simply to be removed as far as possible from any temperamentalrelation to the race of Starrs.
"I wish I could, dear," I answered, as I rose to go out, "but remember,I've never been on a horse in my life and it's too late to begin."
"Oh, I forgot. Of course you can't," she rejoined. "So if George isn'tstrong enough to hold me back, I'll have to go straight after Bonny."
"I promise you I'll swing on with all my might, Ben," said George, witha laugh in which I felt there was an amiable condescension, as from thebest horseman in his state to a man who had never ridden to hounds.
A little later, as I walked down the street, past the old grey house,under the young budding leaves of the sycamores, the recollection ofthis amiable condescension returned to me like the stab of a knife. Theimage of Sally, mounted on Prince Charlie, at George's side, troubled mythoughts, and I wondered, with a pang, if the people who saw themtogether would ask themselves curiously why she had chosen me. To oneand all of them,--to Miss Mitty, to Bonny Page, to Dr. Theophilus,--themystery, I felt, was as obscure to-day as it had been in the beginningof our love. Why was it? I questioned angrily, and wherein lay thesubtle distinction which divided my nature from George Bolingbroke's andeven from Sally's? The forces of democracy had made way for me, and yetwas there something stronger than democracy--and this something, fineand invincible as a blade, I had felt long ago in the presence of MissMitty and Miss Matoaca. Over my head, under the spreading boughs of thesycamore, a window was lifted, and between the parted lace curtains, thesong of Miss Mitty's canary floated out into the street. As the musicentered my thoughts, I remembered suddenly the box of sweet alyssumblooming on the window-sill under the swinging cage, and there flashedinto my consciousness the meaning of the flowers George had laid besideSally's plate. For her sake he had gone to Miss Mitty in the sad oldhouse, and that little blossom was the mute expression of a service hehad rendered joyfully in the name of love. The gratitude in Sally's eyeswas made clear to me, and a helpless rage at my own blindness, my owndenseness, flooded my heart. George, because of some inborn fineness ofperception, had discerned the existence of a sorrow in my wife to whichI, the man whom she loved and who loved her, had been insensible. He hadunderstood and had comforted--while I, engrossed in larger matters, hadgone on my way unheeding and indifferent. Then the anger against myselfturned blindly upon George, and I demanded passionately if he wouldstand forever in my life as the embodiment of instincts and perceptionsthat the generations had bred? Would I fail forever in little thingsbecause I had been cursed at birth by an inability to see any except bigones? And where I failed would George be always ready to fill theunspoken need and to bestow the unasked-for sympathy?