One of Life's Paradoxes
"DON'T tell me, if it distresses you."
"Yes; we must start right. I don't mind its distressing me,"—neither could catch a smile just then,—"so much as admitting the compliment to him. He wasn't worth it. I never thought he was, you understand. And I fought against it. It is humiliating that it was true and that he knew it! And now to have to hurt you with it, John!"
"Don't take it so hard, dear. I understand. Don't."
"How good you are! That's only another reason I'm sorry. You don't know how a girl prizes her first bloom. Don't you"—she looked up, puzzled, at his moved, embarrassed face—"don't you care about it?"
He did not try to belittle what he felt she exaggerated. Her high key was part of her exquisiteness and preciousness for him. "But certainly now we can forget about it. Perhaps if it hadn't been for him you never would have cared for a dull chap like me."
"There is something in that. Yes. It taught me values and how to judge them: how to appreciate a man like you,—bless your heart!" Marcia just missed being pretty. Her mouth was bad—too full, with full chin and throat; an ugly mouth, but sensitive. The fine eyes had a tinge of melancholy in their thoughtfulness. And the ugly mouth and beautiful eyes had the sweetest, tenderest smile imaginable. She poured it over him now. "Still . . ."
The regret, the wish, remained. Often, in the first years of their marriage, memory thrilled her with longing for the glory and the dream. It was not the man she regretted, but if only she could have cared for John that way, too. Dear old John! as if she could love him any more. But no contrition for the thought quite denied it, nor the admission of it that was in her attempts to make amends to him for the lack, in her incense, of the ultimate sweetness,—which he never missed.
With the high opinion one has of what he does not understand, and the admiration for what he cannot do, John considered her a very remarkable woman. The compliments her music brought, her taste for the poets, her cult of art, drew such pride of loyalty as sometimes made her feel foolish. But in their evenings alone he wanted tunes, or, better still, cribbage. Needed to rest his mind after the office, he said; and to Marcia blocks would have been about as diverting.
"You do the society and culture," he told her, "and let me pay the bills and admire you. That suits me." But if Chopin and Shakespeare were on her mind all day, they would not stay off her tongue at night. And then John grew sleepy by eight o'clock.
Once the study of woman was to hold the favor of her lord. Now the fetish is companionship. In its beginning her struggle was to catch up; shortly in many cases she outstripped. First and last it is the woman who makes the effort, who modifies, sacrifices. One by one Marcia gave up her interests for domesticity—like a beggar of the Orient, maiming herself for the sake of her profession. John did not know. Things had always suited him. He never bothered about their dissimilarities. If he had formulated it at all, he would have thought they had enough as it was, and Marcia could see what she liked at the matinees. But to Marcia a thing unshared with him was half spoiled. Love meant so much, she wanted it to mean everything. She insisted on hanging the shrine of the Most Beneficent Presence with the trivialities of life.
The upshot was restlessness, lack of occupation, a little condescension in her tenderness, a little self-pity in her devotion.
Then the boy came.
Marcia never forgot that morning when she woke conscious of a strange little presence near her arm that thrilled
