“I wonder what he meant!”

Mrs. Thatcher had risen from the breakfast table from which her husband had departed some time since, after throwing out a mysterious hint about some event in store for her. She had better look out for—what? He had gone before she could question him further.

She went to the front window now, gazing down the street after Bobby, her only child, on his way to the kindergarten. She was a very tall young woman, yet lost none of her femininity by her height; it seemed rather to emphasize it in a willowy droop that always suggested an appealing dependence, in connection with the upward glance of her dark eyes. Her hair was dark, like her eyes, and very thick; her lips were red and curved; her cheeks were usually pale, but there was a faint glow on them now. Nevin had made a terse but complimentary remark about her appearance in that blue cambric morning dress, which she had received with as much innocent surprise as if she had not planned for it. He had also said that he pitied that[32] poor fellow next door whose wife was homely enough to take away his appetite.

Mr. Thatcher’s attitude towards his wife was the subject both of good-natured comment and raillery among her neighbours. His least action towards her was charged, though unobtrusively, with that subtle and intimate attention which one only expects from a lover. He even had a way of helping her up and down the steps that was “different” to the married eye. Patently unintellectual as Mildred Thatcher was, she yet indisputably retained her charm for the man who was intellectual. She had, in fact, that sweet will to be beloved which instinctively foreruns occasion, and makes a place for it in all the little daily matters of life.

“I wonder what he meant! I feel exactly as if somebody would come out from town to-day—it’s such a lovely morning.” She spoke half aloud as she looked down the street through the green feathery foliage of the elms, just out in their spring dress. The sun shone caressingly through them upon the crocuses peeping out in the front grass-plot, and the air, delicately cool, was charged with perfume. There were all the usual adjuncts of spring in the suburbs. A department store wagon was already delivering parcels at a house further down, and several[33] women, fresh and neatly gloved, were alertly stepping trainward to get an early start for the day’s shopping, impelled thither by that soft breeze which woos womankind to the pursuit of clothes. All down the block the palms and rubber plants were being sunned on piazza steps, the former, for the most part, conspicuously brown and withered, but the latter still chunkily green after a winter of furnace heat and dust and gas.

To feel the spring air and not want to spend money was impossible even to Mildred Thatcher, but even if she could have purchased the rug so badly needed for the little drawing-room she would not leave home to-day. She was sure some one would be out from town. She turned now to the maid and gave her orders for luncheon.

“You can make the cold meat into croquettes, Kitty, and we’ll have pop-overs. And I’d like you to wash out the violet centerpiece.”

“Very well, ma’am.”

The hint of a pending pleasure had set its seal on the day. It might be Madge Stanfield who would come, or the Laviers, or her Cousin Lou. She set things to rights, and dusted and arranged daintily, and put fresh violets in the glass vases, and by and by, late in the morning, when all was done, went out on the[34] piazza to listen for the train, while deciding whether or no to send her dwindling palms to the florist. She scrutinized the rubber plant anxiously for some sign of growth. The rubber plant was, in a way, a proof of the demoralizing extremes of Mildred’s nature. For a season she had railed intemperately at rubber plants and their possessors, and then, after moving from a flat to the suburbs, had incontinently gone forth one morning on the spur of the moment and bought one. It somehow didn’t seem as if they were really householders without that green and visible emblem of a much-enduring domesticity. Mrs. Thatcher cherished an idea that her rubber plant would grow with tropical luxuriance, but as yet it had only remained stolidly green.

“Good-morning!”

It was a neighbour, who, deflecting from the pavement, came up, with a paper bag in one hand, to lean familiarly against the post at the foot of the low steps.

“Your plants need water,” she continued, casting an officially critical eye upon them.

“They were watered this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher.

“It should be done at the same time every day,” said the neighbour, obliviously. “Dear me, it’s getting warm, isn’t it? You look fresh and cool enough. I had to go to the[35] village at the last moment for rolls for lunch. I’m dreadfully tired. Spring weather does make your feet hurt so, doesn’t it? Well—good-bye!”

Mrs. Thatcher still stood looking down the street—a train had come in while they were talking. Yes, there was some one coming—a lady in brown—it must be Madge. No, it was only Mrs. Brereton.

“Back from the city already?” she called, as the figure approached.

“Yes. I only went in to match a sample. Dear me! how warm it is! This weather makes your feet hurt dreadfully. I wanted to stay in town and do something about furnishing the new house, but it takes so long to look at rugs, and I’ve a dressmaker waiting for me at home this moment.” She stopped an instant, leaning against the post, as the other had done. “How dry your plants look! they need water! Mercy! is that Meyer’s wagon stopping before my house? Well, good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” said Mrs. Thatcher, coolly. Not only was Meyer’s wagon standing before Mrs. Brereton’s, but several other wagons from department stores were stopping further up the street, sending forth boys laden up to the chin with fat, brown parcels and long, narrow, brown parcels. Mrs. Thatcher turned[36] around to see yet another friend, who, without her hat, had come out of the house adjoining, and now dropped down beside her on the steps.

“Isn’t it heavenly! I saw you out here and couldn’t resist coming over for a minute. I’ve been sewing so hard on the children’s spring clothes, I’ve hardly had a glimpse of you for a week.—Your plants need water, don’t they?”

“No, they don’t,” said Mrs. Thatcher, with unspeakable exasperation. She controlled herself with an effort as she rose. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go in the house. I’m rather expecting company.”

“The express wagon seems to be coming here,” said the friend detainingly.

“Why, so it is!” cried Mrs. Thatcher, her irritation subsiding before this new interest. The unexpected advent of the express wagon always suggested pleasing and mysterious possibilities to her, until recollection brought to mind the usual case of mineral water, or the box from the tailor’s with her husband’s discarded clothing. This time, however, it was a box of another kind, oblong and wooden. The man who deposited it in the little square hall evidently found it heavy. This, then, was what Nevin had meant.

What could it be? Mrs. Thatcher stubbed[37] her finger with the screw-driver, and hit her own nail lustily with the hammer, in her efforts to open the box. When she finally succeeded, and caught sight of the contents, she pushed it from her with a sharp exclamation of disgust.

Inside were two rows of large, morocco-bound volumes. The gilt lettering on the back showed that they were “Selections from the Literature of All Nations, with Lives of the Authors.”

“Of all things!” said Mrs. Thatcher in a tone of deep disappointment. “What on earth does he want to keep on getting these subscription things for? And he knows we need the money for the rug. He’ll never read these—he’ll never even look at them. I cannot understand it! He never sees a book without wanting to buy it—he says he just likes to have books. Well, he’ll have to find a place to put these, for I can’t.”

“Shall I take the books out of the box, ma’am?” asked Kitty, coming into the hall.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” replied Mrs. Thatcher wearily. “Yes, I suppose you’ll have to; we can’t leave the box here.” She looked over at the tiny drawing-room, with its little spindle-legged mahogany tea-table, the low well-filled bookcase, the rattan sofa[38] with its bright pillows, and the small upright piano, and then at the solid pile of information at her feet. There were thirty volumes—for she had counted them—thirty volumes pressed down and running over with the Literature of All Nations.

“I suppose you’ll have to pile them up in the corner over there. I’m sure I don’t know what to do with them.”

“And shall I put the lunch on now, ma’am?”

“Is it time? Oh, yes; Bobby is coming in. Yes, put it on.”

Croquettes and pop-overs and the violet centerpiece for this arrival by express, indeed! She felt unaccountably defrauded—a sensation that lingered with her throughout the whole afternoon, and tinged her with melancholy, even when she responded to the playful overtures or the needs of Bobby, who kept continually running in from the back yard to have his ball mended, or a string tied to something. He struggled away from her when she wanted to kiss him, and he smelled indescribably of earth. He was of the sex which grew up to have strange ways and alien tastes—he even had them now. Mrs. Thatcher had not wanted a boy, although she loved this one devotedly. She longed inexpressibly sometimes for a dear little[39] gentle, clinging girl, who could be frivolously dressed in soft, white, ruffly things, and have her sweet hair curled.

Mildred Thatcher could never help a mysteriously hurt feeling when her Nevin spent his money for books, or indeed for anything apart from her, of his own volition; there were always so many things needed perennially by “the house,” not to speak of her own wardrobe. Her feminine mind was incapacitated by nature from seeing anything from a man’s point of view—it was from the sheer force of her love alone that she leapt the chasm between them. It was from the heart, not the mind, that she divined what she did of him, as the blind see through feeling finger-tips. And even when she could not perceive how he wanted his own way—nay, when she had protested against it with intensity—after she had once proved herself in the right, she was apt to be overtaken by a sweet, fiercely unreasoning desire that he should have everything he wanted, just because he wanted it, and because he would love her better if he did, and she would grovel, and cringe, and eat her words unblushingly, in her efforts to drive him back into his own path. If she used all her energy now to making him send that wealth of literature back where it came[40] from, she would probably labour still harder the next day to make him get it again.

There was an aloofness in her greeting, when he came home a little earlier than usual, which he was unusually quick to detect. His eyes were agreeably expectant, with none of the deprecation in them which she had looked for. Mr. Thatcher himself was one of Mildred’s inconsistencies. She had sworn that she would never marry any but a very tall man, yet her Nevin, stalwart and broad-shouldered as he was, did not top the highest roll of her dark hair.

“What’s the matter?” His hand lingered on her shoulder. “Don’t you feel well?”

“Oh, yes—pretty well.”

“Did you get the package I sent by express?”

“Yes; what to do with all those volumes I do not know. It is so inconsiderate of you when——”

“Oh, I didn’t mean the books—and I stopped at the carpenter’s; he is going to make shelves for them. But I meant the other package.”

“There wasn’t any other package.”

“Yes, there was”—his arm was still half around her. “I sent you—why here’s the expressman now. Hi! This is the place; yes, bring it here.”

[41]

He came back again to his wife. “There was a little debt paid me yesterday. After I got the books, I thought I’d buy a present for you.” He pressed her shoulder gently.

“Oh!”

“Something you’ve been wanting a long time, something you’ll like. It’s the large rug for the parlour.”

“The rug—Nevin, you didn’t get a rug without me?”

“You’ll find it’s all right when you see it. Stand off a moment”—he was disposing of the knotted cords with sharp clicks of his penknife. “I’ll spread it out for you. There—what do you think of that?”

“What did you pay for it?” asked Mrs. Thatcher in an odd voice.

“Not much, considering what it’s worth,” said her husband, still exuberant. “It’s genuine something or other, I forget what. I got it at a bargain at a place down-town where they are selling off. It took my eye the moment I saw it. What’s the matter, Mildred? Don’t you like it?”

“Why, it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Thatcher, trying to keep rein on her feelings. “Only of course, those reds and yellows don’t go with anything that we have; it would look perfectly dreadful with the old rose wallpaper.”

[42]

“Why, I don’t see that it would.”

Mr. Thatcher was still lovingly regarding the article in question, stretched out in the hall. “They put all kinds of colours together nowadays. Here, let me set it out where it belongs, and see if you don’t think it looks all right.”

He switched a chair or two out of the way, moved back the tea-table, and stretched the rug down on the open space on the floor. He stood off admiringly. “Now, don’t you think that’s fine? Why don’t you speak?”

“Oh, Nevin, it’s too dreadful! Can’t you see? It’s a disgrace, a perfect disgrace. I wouldn’t have any one I cared for come into the house with that thing on the floor; I don’t know what they’d think of me.” Her voice had gone beyond control, and rose more and more hysterical.

“Oh, how could you be mean enough to go and buy a rug without me—something I’d set my heart on. A rug, of all things, that you have to live with always! And I had been looking forward so to choosing it with you! Why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s so terrible, it’s so common——”

“‘Common!’ Now you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mr. Thatcher’s confidence in the pleasing powers of his purchase died hard. “It’s genuine—I forget just[43] what, but it is genuine. I thought you’d know.”

“I do know—it’s one of the cheapest kinds there are. Nevin, I can’t have it in here, you must understand that. Why, I couldn’t eat my meals if I had to look in and see it. Can’t you take it back and change it?”

“Change it!”

Mildred had known, even as she spoke, that the suggestion was unforgivable. She could go to town merrily, day after day, exchanging goods, but her husband would have felt like a sneak thief if he had taken anything back to “change it.”

“No, I can not!” His anger was at last aroused, and thoroughly. “If you don’t like the thing you can chuck it out into the street, for all I care. I tried to give you a pleasure, and this is what I get for it. I’ll never buy you another thing as long as I live!”

It was on the tip of Mrs. Thatcher’s tongue to say, “I hope you won’t,” but this time something restrained her. There were but few times that she had seen her husband as angry as this, and never at her, though there might have been more provocative occasions. He had bought many things before which she had not liked, without any real friction between husband and wife—it was one of “his” ways which they had often laughed[44] over. But each day’s path is different from that of yesterday—what has been a convenient stone to rest on before becomes unexpectedly a stumbling-block in the way. Mr. Thatcher’s wrath, indeed, gathered its greatest force from the underlying knowledge that he might have done differently.

The subject was dropped at dinner, but Mrs. Thatcher could not forbear beginning on it again afterwards. Nevin must see how dreadful it was to have that rug, if it was properly put to him. But he stopped her after the first tearful expostulations.

“Never say ‘rug’ to me again,” he commanded briefly. “You’ve said too much already.” He read a magazine all the evening, and after a while she went up-stairs and lay down on the edge of Bobby’s little bed, beside her sleeping child, and wept.

It was unbelievable, unbearable, that he could buy that horrible thing without her! And there was no other place in the tiny house to put it. When she looked at it in the morning it was worse even than she had dreamed—it put her teeth on edge. The home didn’t seem like hers! She averted her face from it patiently at breakfast, and her mouth drooped pathetically, but Nevin only read his paper and kissed her unseeingly when he left. When he was gone, she and[45] Kitty rolled the rug up into a corner. If any one came they could think she was cleaning house.

And on the morrow, and the morrow after, the rug, like a malevolent force, still separated them. She would have given it away if she could have afforded to have done so. As time went on there was a certain change in her own way of regarding it. Still she had that choked sensation when she thought of his going and buying it without her, but she did not think of it as often. She began to discern that she had lost something inconceivably more precious than the sublimated rug of her fancy. It was not only that Nevin had no longer any desire to buy her anything, but there was a subtle reservation of spirit. In that fit of unreasoning passion she had lost some attraction for him, some of that aureole of romance which is at once the most intangible and the dearest possession of the married, for which a woman may indeed keep her most shining thought, her sweetest care. What was any rug compared with her husband’s sentiment for her? Yet it was not a mere rug to her, but one of the symbols of a home. Did she love him ten times more, the sight of that cheap and glaring inconsistency would bring the vexed tears to her eyes. She knew her limitations by instinct—it[46] was no use to try and laugh at being parted by a colour scheme—never could she be heroically strong enough to move and have her being as if the rug were not there.

For nine days Mildred Thatcher lived as her neighbours, a life as thick and solid, as uninformed with the spirit as the rubber plant which stood neglected in the drawing-room by the pile of books—as yet unshelved—and the dusty upright piano. The palms had gone to the florist’s, and she had no heart to take the rubber plant in and out each day. She did not care whether the thing died or not. She did not care for anything. Every night when Nevin came home, she greeted him as calmly and affectionately as he greeted her, and waited, tingling, for developments which never came. The rug, which dominated her every waking moment, had, indeed, been almost forgotten by him—pressed out of sight, as is a man’s wont with disagreeable domestic happenings, only the unpleasant impression remaining. He read or went to sleep on the sofa, and they both spent some evenings out. After a week had passed, and while Mildred was waiting for the change in her husband’s manner, it suddenly came over her with a strange shock that he was not only losing his delicate perception of her, but that he was growing content without it.[47] It is so easy to lapse to the lower level! They were getting into the rut that only grows the deeper with travel.

Then there came a day when Mrs. Thatcher could stand it no longer. She had a consultation with Mrs. Brereton, and the next morning the latter came over and the two talked further with great animation over the rug in the little drawing-room. After that Mrs. Thatcher dressed herself with unusual care. She put on her new dark blue suit and a hat that her husband always admired, although it was not quite in the fashion. She looked at herself again and again in the glass before she started for the train, giving a touch here and a touch there with nervous fingers. She could not wait for her husband to come home, even if she had been less painfully aware of her new powerlessness in the conventional surroundings. She must venture into new scenes if she would gain what she wanted. And she could not stand this a minute longer—she must end it all now.

Yet, her heart was beating painfully as she neared the city, and she was only somewhat reassured by the glimpse in the ferry-boat mirror of a tall, slender-throated woman with soft, pale cheeks and a curved mouth, her dark eyes gazing indifferently before her under a hat whose cherry wreath drooped[48] against her dark hair, and who turned out to be herself. If she really looked like that——

Her hand lingered on the knob of the ground-glass door that led to the office of her husband’s factory. Then she opened it.

“Nevin!”

Her husband, broad and square-shouldered, was standing over another man’s desk, beyond, talking. There were lines of care on his forehead, and a pencil behind his ear—he was the man of business, not her husband.

He looked up amazed as he saw his wife, but came forward at once.

“Why, Mildred!”

“Oh, Nevin, I hope you don’t mind! I’ve been feeling so dreadfully, I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. I’ve something—something to tell you.”

She began to shake a little, her lip trembled, her eyes looked appealingly at him like a child’s. Her husband had always known as a matter of course that she was beautiful, but her beauty came now like a surprise in the dingy surroundings of the factory office, with the whirr of the planing machines beyond. His eyes met the appeal in hers with a smile that set her pulse beating anew, as he said:

“What is it? Hadn’t you better sit down?”

[49]

“No, no! Not yet. Maybe you won’t want me to—— Oh, Nevin, I’ve been trying to tell you every night lately how sorry I was—I’d acted so—about the rug—and I couldn’t! You wouldn’t give me a chance.”

The well-known stiffness came over him—a shadow of the past shade.

“That’s of no consequence—don’t let’s talk about it.”

“Yes, please—I must! Oh, Nevin, I hope you won’t mind. I knew I couldn’t be decent while the rug was there. I’m so frightfully narrow-minded—things make me horrid even when I don’t want to be. I’ve—I’ve sold it.”

“Sold it?”

“Yes. Mrs. Brereton bought it for her brother-in-law’s room. She didn’t pay quite as much as you did—you left the price mark on—but she said you were cheated.”

“I don’t care what you do with it. I thought it was a pretty good sort, myself.”

“It was a lovely rug,” said Mrs. Thatcher earnestly, “only it wasn’t in the right place. It was just what Mrs. Brereton wanted—for her brother-in-law. But it seemed so mean of me to sell it—when it was your present—and I’ve been so unhappy lately—Nevin—you can’t think!”

Her eyes brimmed as she gazed at him;[50] the red cherries in her hat shook against the dark hair that framed her soft, pale cheeks.

“Sit down,” said Mr. Thatcher briefly, pushing a wooden armed office chair towards her. He went away momentarily, and then came back. “Have you had your lunch?”

“No,” replied Mrs. Thatcher faintly.

“Well, neither have I. I think you’d be better for something to eat. You wait five minutes and I’ll be ready to go out with you. We’ll have a little lunch together.”

She raised her drooping head to give him the wistfully pleased, half-encouraged look of one dependent on a benign higher power. Her heart was swelling with the joy of triumph.

When he returned to her with his overcoat, he had been brushed clear of the factory dust and looked trim and smiling, hat in hand.

“It’s nearly two o’clock. I think I won’t come back here this afternoon; I’ve got through about all there is to do. It’s a dull day. I’m going to take you around to the Electrographic Club to lunch; they’ve got a new room for ladies. You’d like to see the pictures there. Come on—this way.”

“Oh, how lovely!” said Mrs. Thatcher, with a deep, contented sigh. “How good you are, Nevin! Do I look all right?”

[51]

“Oh, you’ll do,” said her husband, with an affectionate squeeze of the arm next him. “See here! You mustn’t look at me in the street that way; people will think we’re engaged.”

“Well, why not?” murmured Mrs. Thatcher. “I don’t care what anybody thinks—Darling!”

“Yes, my husband selected it,” said Mildred. The next door neighbour was standing in Mrs. Thatcher’s little drawing-room with her, and they were both looking down at a dark velvety rug with an Oriental blend of colours in it. “It was a present to me, but he wouldn’t think of getting it alone—though he has such excellent taste. We made quite a little event of buying it yesterday.”

“It is beautiful,” said the neighbour, with a regretful sigh. “How dry that rubber plant looks; it needs water. Why don’t you have it outdoors?”

“Oh, I have it out all the time,” asseverated Mrs. Thatcher hastily. “At least, nearly all the time. Lately I’ve forgotten to see about it. I’ve been so—so busy. Why, I do believe there’s a new green leaf coming out at the top!”

“Rubber plants can stand a great deal,”[52] said the neighbour philosophically, following Mrs. Thatcher, who was lugging the heavy pot out into the wooing breeze of the late afternoon. She was so touchingly happy that she felt as if she could have lifted mountains.

She stood and looked down the elm-shaded street, through which the footsteps of her beloved would soon be hastening to her. The department store wagons were still rattling up and down, delivering relays and relays of parcels at the different houses, and here and there weary, draggled-looking women were returning from town, each carrying by one end the large paper bag which contains an untrimmed hat. You could tell by the way they walked that their feet hurt. Down the block the freshening palms and rubber plants were grouped at intervals. On Mrs. Thatcher’s piazza, the emblem of a much-enduring domesticity once more stood in the sunshine, stolid and green.