The little pale image of goodness so frequently seen sitting in Cutter’s car before the bank waiting for him around five o’clock in the afternoon was what remained of the original Helen two years after he had relinquished his plan to live in New York. Keeping an entirely good resolution may be strengthening to character, but it is fearfully damaging to feminine beauty. For one thing such women lose the sense of clothes. Helen had known how to dress in the happy, wild-rose period of her youth; but how can you keep up the flaunting, flowing sweetness of your draperies when you are no longer a girl to be won, but have become a wife who has been reduced to her duties and her virtues?
Still, things had not been as bad for her as she had expected they would be. George was away from home now much of the time. He had interests in New York and spent at least a part of every month there. But she heard from him regularly, usually a wire, sometimes a brief note. When he was at home, it was the same old routine,[154] except that he spent more time at the golf and country club.
The truth was that Helen got on his nerves frightfully with her silence and dutifulness and patience. The impeccable wife is a difficult proposition, if you tackle it. Cutter instinctively avoided the issue. He accepted Helen for this awfully “better” woman than he had bargained for. There was none of that human “worse” in her, so amply provided for in the marriage ceremony, with which to vary the monotony of their life together. Often he wished for a stormy scene, such as by nature married people are entitled to have. If he was irritable, she left him alone. If he was calm, she would come and sit and sew a fine seam in a sweet silence that was perfectly maddening. If he flung the paper he was reading on the floor, slammed his feet down and groaned, she would look up at him, then drop her eyes once more to this seam—or she would rise and leave the room noiselessly.
Good heavens! He could not stand it, meaning “her.” Why didn’t she complain that he neglected her? Why didn’t she say something, show some spirit? Why didn’t she appeal to his conscience? That was what a wife was for—one thing, at least. If she would only show some[155] fight, he might regain control of himself; as it was, he was slipp............