Lifted Masks | Page 7

without my callin' your attention to it. Last time I went to see her I had just made fifty thousand on a deal. And I found her down on her knees thinking she was scrubbing the floor!"
Unconsciously Virginia's hand went out, following the rush of sympathy and understanding. "But can't they--restrain her?" she murmured.
"Makes her worse. Says she's got it to do--frets her to think she's not getting it done."
"But isn't there some _way_?" she whispered. "Some way to make her _know_?"
He pointed to the large boxes. "That," he said simply, "is the meaning of those. It's been seven years--but I keep on trying."
She was silent, the tears too close for words. And she had thought it cheap ambition!--vulgar aspiration--silly show--vanity!
"Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking things. But you see now? Thought it might attract her attention, thought something real gorgeous like this might impress money on her. Though I don't know,"--he seemed to grow weary as he told it; "I got her a lot of diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and she thought she'd stolen 'em, and they had to take them away."
Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.
"But there's nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on trying. And anyhow--a fellow likes to think he's taking his wife something from Paris."
They passed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony--those things they had bought that afternoon: an _opera cloak_--a _velvet dress_--_those hats_--red silk stockings.
The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop Virginia was softly crying.
"Oh, now that's too bad," he expostulated clumsily. "Why, look here, Young Lady, I didn't mean you to take it so hard."
When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And the thing which revealed him--glorified him--was less the grief he gave to it than the way he saw it. "It's the cursed unfairness of it," he concluded. "When you consider it's all because she did those things--when you think of her bein' bound to 'em for life just because she was _too faithful doin' 'em_--when you think that now--when I could give her everything these women have got!--she's got to go right on worrying about baking the bread and washing the dishes--did it for me when I was poor--and now with me rich she can't get out of it--and I _can't reach_ her--oh, it's _rotten!_ I tell you it's _rotten!_ Sometimes I can just hear my money laugh at me! Sometimes I get to going round and round in a circle about it till it seems I'm going crazy myself."
"I think you are a--a noble man," choked Virginia.
That disconcerted him. "Oh Lord--don't think that. No, Young Lady, don't try to make any plaster saint out of me. My life goes on. I've got to eat, drink and be merry. I'm built that way. But just the same my heart on the inside's pretty sore, Young Lady. I want to tell you that the whole inside of my heart is sore as a boil!"
They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the pause. "There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who aren't well. Such soft, lovely things to wear in your room. Not but what I think these other things are all right. As you say, they may--interest her. But they aren't things she can use just now, and wouldn't you like her to have some of those soft lovely things she could actually wear? They might help most of all. To wake in the morning and find herself in something so beautiful--"
"Where do you get 'em?" he demanded promptly.
And so they went to one of those shops which have, more than all the others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out that afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely _robe de nuit_--so soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, it seemed that surely it might help bring release from the bondage of those crushing years.
As they were leaving they were given two packages. "Just the kimona thing you liked," he said, "and a trinket or two. Now that we're such good friends, you won't feel like you did this morning."
"And if I don't want them myself, I might send them to my mother," Virginia replied, a quiver in her laugh at her own little joke.
He had put her in her cab; he had tried to tell her how much he thanked her; they had said good-bye and the cocher had cracked his whip when he came running after her. "Why, Young Lady," he called out, "we don't