"Oh—you have so many cousins, I forget. Are they interesting? Or clever? Or frightfully rich? Or beautiful?" she jested.
He thought it out. "No—o, no, I suppose not. But they are near to me—my mother's sister's children."
"But why need we—"
"Oh, you needn't go, dear, of course. But I must. I couldn't bear to hurt them;" he added, wistfully: "they'll want so to see you—they've heard so much of you."
She was candidly amused in a way he apprehended to the core, and the very apprehension hurt him more than he cared to admit.
"You're laughing at me for caring so—about just relatives who aren't anything in particular."
"Why do you care?" asked his wife, curiously.
He did not explain, only replied, slowly, "It's silly of me, I dare say."
"I don't understand you, Richard. You have a beautiful perception of everything, but in this—Why bother about the mass of things—in this case, relatives? It's the individual always that counts with me."
And there she summed up the whole case for them both, though she did not then guess it.
When it was a question of himself, Keppel's wife was wonderfully generous. She saw not the real issue, but only him. So she closed their discussion with: "We'll go, Richard, of course, if you want to. I want always, above everything, to please you."
He sighed, for she had missed the essence of it. "To please him"—that was just the very thing, intrinsically, that he didn't want. That was the key to everything. If she could but see in his relatives what he saw—not, perhaps, companionship, nor charm, nor intellect, nor social preferment; he was too keen an analyst, had gone too far, had seen too much, to mark these qualities in his kin; but to find and to cherish the bond,—that was it.
Keppel hammered it all out after his wife had gone to her room, and always with perfect exoneration for her. "They bore her, that's the truth of it," he sighed. "She's too fine for us. It isn't that I want to force them down her; nor hold them up as paragons. Nothing like that; I know where they fail—know it better, too, since I've known her. I ought to be clear to her, but I'm not; she's not had my chances for it—for relatives," he laughed, rue- fully. "It's enough for her that kinsfolk just are. She can't get the fact that, however modern and advanced I might grow, I can't shake them off like dust from my coat. They're mine own people, confound it,—mine! I must be square with them! Poor Frances, I'm not her sort, that's true."
In the end there was little comfort in all this for Keppel. There is rarely comfort in an abstract proposition of justice. The grievance stayed with him—the grievance that Frances couldn't see what his relatives meant to him. He went over it again painfully: "Great heavens, I wouldn't hurt one of them for the world. I couldn't do that—they'd never understand. And Frances won't see it! She's too good for us—we're common folk, after all. I was a fool, maybe, to think I could come up to her completely. But my attitude toward my relatives, in her eyes, must put me below her, where I can't reach up. And some day she'll know it out for a certainty, and then—"
The end of the pondering left him down, left his sensibilities in a roughened state, gave him a soreness of attitude toward—he believed it faithfully—himself alone, toward his incapacity, his failure to make out for Frances all she had expected to find in marriage with him.
This mood of unworthiness daily grew on him, accentuated from time to time by the recurrent periods of very old friends, or more relatives—there were always more with Keppel. To Frances they were confessedly not worth while, intrinsically considered. She did not see, in their life, which was undeniably a good one, why, when her friends were so freely and desirably at her husband's disposal, he might not rest content; especially as he repeatedly declared, and with sincerity, the people she knew were the people he found actually most compatible with his thought and aim.
The situation livened in Keppel, by fault of its very untalkableness, a seed of distrust and suspicion of everything
