hope and there is no use
wasting words upon you; I have come to tell you that you bore me
inexpressibly. (That would be the most dreadful revenge of all. He
could see his uncle's face!) That you have a genius for taking the wrong
side of every question, and I can no longer endure it. I dissipate my
time. Good-night!"
He wouldn't have said it in quite so stately a way, possibly, the
sentences would not have been quite so rounded, but the context would
have been the same.
Glorious; but it wasn't said. Instead, once a month, he got into his
dinner-jacket, brushed his hair very sleekly, walked six blocks, said
good-evening to his uncle's butler, and went on back to the library,
where, in a room rich with costly bindings, and smelling pleasantly of
leather, and warmly yellow with the light of two shaded lamps, he
would find his uncle reading before a crackling wood fire. What
followed was almost a formula, an exquisite presentation of stately
manners, an exquisite avoidance of any topic which might cause a real
discussion. The dinner was invariably gentle, persuasive, a thoughtful
gastronomic achievement. Heaven might become confused about its
weather, and about wars, and things like that, but Mr. McCain never
became confused about his menus. He had a habit of commending wine.
"Try this claret, my dear fellow, I want your opinion.... A drop of this
Napoleonic brandy won't hurt you a bit." He even sniffed the bouquet
before each sip; passed, that is, the glass under his nose and then drank.
But Adrian, with a preconceived image of the personality back of this,
and the memory of too many offences busy in his mind, saw nothing
quaint or amusing. His gorge rose. Damn his uncle's wines, and his
mushrooms, and his soft-footed servants, and his house of nuances and
evasions, and his white grapes, large and outwardly perfect, and
inwardly sentimental as the generation whose especial fruit they were.
As for himself, he had a recollection of ten years of poverty after
leaving college; a recollection of sweat and indignities; he had also a
recollection of some poor people whom he had known.
Afterward, when the dinner was over, Adrian would go home and
awake his wife, Cecil, who, with the brutal honesty of an honest
woman, also some of the ungenerosity, had early in her married life
flatly refused any share in the ceremonies described. Cecil would lie in
her small white bed, the white of her boudoir-cap losing itself in the
white of the pillow, a little sleepy and a little angrily perplexed at the
perpetual jesuitical philosophy of the male. "If you feel that way," she
would ask, "why do you go there, then? Why don't you banish your
uncle utterly?" She asked this not without malice, her long, violet,
Slavic eyes widely open, and her red mouth, a trifle too large, perhaps,
a trifle cruel, fascinatingly interrogative over her white teeth. She loved
Adrian and had at times, therefore, the right and desire to torture him.
She knew perfectly well why he went. He was his uncle's heir, and until
such time as money and other anachronisms of the present social
system were done away with, there was no use throwing a fortune into
the gutter, even if by your own efforts you were making an income just
sufficiently large to keep up with the increased cost of living.
Sooner or later Adrian's mind reverted to Mrs. Denby. This was usually
after he had been in bed and had been thinking for a while in the
darkness. He could not understand Mrs. Denby. She affronted his
modern habit of thought.
"The whole thing is so silly and adventitious!"
"What thing?"
Adrian was aware that his wife knew exactly of what he was talking,
but he had come to expect the question. "Mrs. Denby and my uncle."
He would grow rather gently cross. "It has always reminded me of
those present-day sword-and-cloak romances fat business men used to
write about ten years ago and sell so enormously--there's an atmosphere
of unnecessary intrigue. What's it all about? Here's the point! Why, if
she felt this way about things, didn't she divorce that gentle drunkard of
a husband of hers years ago and marry my uncle outright and honestly?
Or why, if she couldn't get a divorce--which she could--didn't she leave
her husband and go with my uncle? Anything in the open! Make a
break--have some courage of her opinions! Smash things; build them
up again! Thank God nowadays, at least, we have come to believe in
the cleanness of surgery rather than the concealing palliatives of
medicine. We're no longer--we modern people--afraid of the world; and
the world can never hurt for any length of time any one
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