THE next day Gordon Barstow had come to see him. The divorce had dragged on. It had not been contested, but there had been delays and consultations1 and Eldridge had come to know Gordon Barstow well.
He had a kind of keen, vicarious pity for Barstow. Sometimes, as he talked with him and the simple lovableness of the man’s nature came up through the uncouthness2, he wondered whether Gordon Barstow might not have regained3 his wife—if he had been determined4. But he had let her go; and after the first day he had seemed to take a kind of pleasure in the proceedings5.
“I’ve been foolish about her,” he said, sitting in Eldridge’s office. “But I don’t want her to suffer because I’ve been foolish—and I want to make her an allowance—a good one. I don’t want Cordelia should ever be poor.” Eldridge looked at him. “Won’t Tower take care of that?” he suggested.
The old man seemed to hold it—“He’ll mean to. He’s honest toward her. I shouldn’t let him marry her if he wasn’t straight. But I want Cordelia provided for.”
And Eldridge suddenly saw that he was thinking of her as a man thinks of his daughter—protectingly. The soreness seemed to have gone out of his hurt. And there was something big in his attitude toward the two who had wronged him. “Cordelia’s only a child,” he said. “I don’t believe I’d ’a’ minded so much—if they’d trusted me. It’s that that hurts, I guess—thinking of the times they must ’a’ lied—and I not knowing enough to see anything was wrong.”
Yes—it was that that hurt—the times Rosalind had slipped away from him, before he knew—when he hadn’t eyes enough to see. He did not mind that she went to Merwin’s. Sometimes he was impatient that she did not go oftener. He would watch eagerly for the look in her face that told him that to-day was a Merwin day.... He did not mind her going, now that he knew. It was the not knowing that hurt.
Sometimes, lately, he had begun to wonder whether Rosalind knew that he was there, whether she guessed who it was that came through the swinging doors and sat across the aisle6, always a little behind her, and went away before she left her place.... He liked to fancy that she knew—and did not mind.
Men and women were not so small as he had made them in his thought. There was room in them generally for life to turn round.
It was this that Gordon Barstow had taught him, he thought. He watched the old man’s simple preparations to make Cordelia “well off” with quiet understanding. It was not reparation with him; it was only a steady, clear intention in the old man’s thought that the woman he had loved and who had gone from him should not suffer.... “I might have kept her—if I’d understood quick enough, I guess. I’m slow—about women,” he said.
Then one day he came into the office. Eldridge had sent him word that there were last papers to sign—and t............