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_ LETHBURY, surveying his wife across the dinner table, found his
transient conjugal glance arrested by an indefinable change in her
appearance.
"How smart you look! Is that a new gown?" he asked.
Her answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the
extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that
the change lay deeper than any accident of dress. At the same time,
he noticed that she betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate,
almost frightened blush. It was one of the compensations of Mrs.
Lethbury's protracted childishness that she still blushed as
prettily as at eighteen. Her body had been privileged not to
outstrip her mind, and the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were
destined to travel together through an eternity of girlishness.
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
Since she never did, he always wondered at her bringing this out as
a fresh grievance against him; but his wonder was unresentful, and
he said good-humoredly: "You sparkle so that I thought you had on
your diamonds."
She sighed and blushed again.
"It must be," he continued, "that you've been to a dressmaker's
opening. You're absolutely brimming with illicit enjoyment."
She stared again, this time at the adjective. His adjectives always
embarrassed her: their unintelligibleness savored of impropriety.
"In short," he summed up, "you've been doing something that you're
thoroughly ashamed of."
To his surprise she retorted: "I don't see why I should be ashamed
of it!"
Lethbury leaned back with a smile of enjoyment. When there was
nothing better going he always liked to listen to her explanations.
"Well--?" he said.
She was becoming breathless and ejaculatory. "Of course you'll
laugh--you laugh at everything!"
"That rather blunts the point of my derision, doesn't it?" he
interjected; but she rushed on without noticing:
"It's so easy to laugh at things."
"Ah," murmured Lethbury with relish, "that's Aunt Sophronia's, isn't
it?"
Most of his wife's opinions were heirlooms, and he took a quaint
pleasure in tracing their descent. She was proud of their age, and
saw no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable.
Some, of course, were so fine that she kept them for state
occasions, like her great-grandmother's Crown Derby; but from the
lady known as Aunt Sophronia she had inherited a stout set of
every-day prejudices that were practically as good as new; whereas
her husband's, as she noticed, were always having to be replaced. In
the early days she had fancied there might be a certain satisfaction
in taxing him with the fact; but she had long since been silenced by
the reply: "My dear, I'm not a rich man, but I never use an opinion
twice if I can help it."
She was reduced, therefore, to dwelling on his moral deficiencies;
and one of the most obvious of these was his refusal to take things
seriously. On this occasion, however, some ulterior purpose kept her
from taking up his taunt.
"I'm not in the least ashamed!" she repeated, with the air of
shaking a banner to the wind; but the domestic atmosphere being
calm, the banner drooped unheroically.
"That," said Lethbury judicially, "encourages me to infer that you
ought to be, and that, consequently, you've been giving yourself the
unusual pleasure of doing something I shouldn't approve of."
She met this with an almost solemn directness. "No," she said. "You
won't approve of it. I've allowed for that."
"Ah," he exclaimed, setting down his liqueur-glass. "You've worked
out the whole problem, eh?"
"I believe so."
"That's uncommonly interesting. And what is it?"
She looked at him quietly. "A baby."
If it was seldom given her to surprise him, she had attained the
distinction for once.
"A baby?"
"Yes."
"A--human baby?"
"Of course!" she cried, with the virtuous resentment of the woman
who has never allowed dogs in the house.
Lethbury's puzzled stare broke into a fresh smile. "A baby I sha'n't
approve of? Well, in the abstract I don't think much of them, I
admit. Is this an abstract baby?"
Again she frowned at the adjective; but she had reached a pitch of
exaltation at which such obstacles could not deter her.
"It's the loveliest baby--" she murmured.
"Ah, then it's concrete. It exists. In this harsh world it draws its
breath in pain--"
"It's the healthiest child I ever saw!" she indignantly corrected.
"You've seen it, then?"
Again the accusing blush suffused her. "Yes--I've seen it."
"And to whom does the paragon belong?"
And here indeed she confounded him. "To me--I hope," she declared.
He pushed his chair back with an inarticulate murmur. "To _you_--?"
"To _us_," she corrected.
"Good Lord!" he said. If there had been the least hint of
hallucination in her transparent gaze--but no: it was as clear, as
shallow, as easily fathomable as when he had first suffered the
sharp surprise of striking bottom in it.
It occurred to him that perhaps she was trying to be funny: he knew
that there is nothing more cryptic than the humor of the unhumorous.
"Is it a joke?" he faltered.
"Oh, I hope not. I want it so much to be a reality--"
He paused to smile at the limitations of a world in which jokes were
not realities, and continued gently: "But since it is one already--"
"To us, I mean: to you and me. I want--" her voice wavered, and her
eyes with it. "I have always wanted so dreadfully...it has been
such a disappointment...not to..."
"I see," said Lethbury slowly.
But he had not seen before. It seemed curious, now, that he had
never thought of her taking it in that way, had never surmised any
hidden depths beneath her outspread obviousness. He felt as though
he had touched a secret spring in her mind.
There was a moment's silence, moist and tremulous on her part,
awkward and slightly irritated on his.
"You've been lonely, I suppose?" he began. It was odd, having
suddenly to reckon with the stranger who gazed at him out of her
trivial eyes.
"At times," she said.
"I'm sorry."
"It was not your fault. A man has so many occupations; and women who
are clever--or very handsome--I suppose that's an occupation too.
Sometimes I've felt that when dinner was ordered I had nothing to do
till the next day."
"Oh," he groaned.
"It wasn't your fault," she insisted. "I never told you--but when I
chose that rose-bud paper for the front room upstairs, I always
thought--"
"Well--?"
"It would be such a pretty paper--for a baby--to wake up in. That
was years ago, of course; but it was rather an expensive paper...
and it hasn't faded in the least..." she broke off incoherently.
"It hasn't faded?"
"No--and so I thought...as we don't use the room for anything ...
now that Aunt Sophronia is dead...I thought I might...
you might...oh, Julian, if you could only have seen it just
waking up in its crib!"
"Seen what--where? You haven't got a baby upstairs?"
"Oh, no--not _yet_," she said, with her rare laugh--the girlish
bubbling of merriment that had seemed one of her chief graces in the
early days. It occurred to him that he had not given her enough
things to laugh about lately. But then she needed such very
elementary things: it was as difficult to amuse her as a savage. He
concluded that he was not sufficiently simple.
"Alice," he said, almost solemnly, "what _do_ you mean?"
She hesitated a moment: he saw her gather her courage for a supreme
effort. Then she said slowly, gravely, as though she were
pronouncing a sacramental phrase:
"I'm so lonely without a little child--and I thought perhaps you'd
let me adopt one....It's at the hospital...its mother is
dead...and I could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for
it...and it's such a good baby...you can ask any of the
nurses...it would never, _never_ bother you by crying..." _
Read next: CHAPTER II
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