The Vehement Flame | Page 5

difference did the twenty severing years
make, after all? Her heart rose with a bound--she had a quick vision of
a little head against her bosom! But she could not put it into words. She
only challenged, him:
"I am not clever like you. Do you think you can love a stupid person for
fifty years?"
"For a thousand years!--but you're not stupid."
She looked doubtful; then went on confessing: "Auntie says I'm a
dummy, because I don't talk very much. And I'm awfully timid. And
she says I'm jealous."
"You don't talk because you're always thinking; that's one of the most
fascinating things about you, Eleanor,--you keep me wondering what
on earth you're thinking about. It's the mystery of you that gets me!
And if you're 'timid'--well, so long as you're not afraid of me, the more
scared you are, the better I like it. A man," said Maurice, "likes to feel
that he protects his--his wife." He paused and repeated the glowing
word ... "his wife!" For a moment he could not go on with their careless
talk; then he was practical again. That word "protect" was too robust
for sentimentality. "As for being jealous, that, about me, is a joke! And
if you were, it would only mean that you loved me--so I would be
flattered. I hope you'll be jealous! Eleanor, promise me you'll be
jealous?" They both laughed; then he said: "I've made up my mind to
one thing. I won't go back to college."
"Oh, Maurice!"
He was very matter of fact. "I'm a married man; I'm going to support
my wife!" He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair in ridiculous
pantomime of terrified responsibility. "Yes, sir! I'm out for dollars.
Well, I'm glad I haven't any near relations to get on their ear, and try
and mind my business for me. Of course," he ruminated, "Bradley will
kick like a steer, when I tell him he's bounced! But that will be on
account of money. Oh, I'll pay him, all same," he said, largely. "Yes;
I'm going to get a job." His face sobered into serious happiness. "My

allowance won't provide bones for Bingo! So it's business for me."
She looked a little frightened. "Oh, have I made you go to work?" She
had never asked him about money; she had plunged into matrimony
without the slightest knowledge of his income.
"I'll chuck Bradley, and I'll chuck college," he announced, "I've got to!
Of course, ultimately, I'll have plenty of money. Mr. Houghton has
dry-nursed what father left me, and he has done mighty well with it; but
I can't touch it till I'm twenty-five--worse luck! Father had theories
about a fellow being kept down to brass tacks and earning his living,
before he inherited money another man had earned--that's the way he
put it. Queer idea. So, I must get a job. Uncle Henry'll help me. You
may bet on it that Mrs. Maurice Curtis shall not wash dishes, nor yet
feed the swine, but live on strawberries, sugar, and--What's the rest of
it?"
"I have a little money of my own," she said; "six hundred a year."
"It will pay for your hairpins," he said, and put out his hand and
touched her hair--black, and very soft and wavy "but the strawberries I
shall provide."
"I never thought about money," she confessed.
"Of course not! Angels don't think about money."
* * * * *
"So they were married"; and in the meadow, fifty-four minutes later,
the sun and wind and moving shadows, and the
river--flowing--flowing--heralded the golden years, and ended the
saying: "lived happy ever afterward."

CHAPTER II
It was three days after the young husband, lying in the grass, his cheek

on his wife's hand, had made his careless prophecy about "whistling,"
that Henry Houghton, jogging along in the sunshine toward Grafton for
the morning mail, slapped a rein down on Lion's fat back, and whistled,
placidly enough.... (But that was before he reached the post office.) His
wife, whose sweet and rosy bulk took up most of the space on the seat,
listened, smiling with content. When he was placid, she was placid;
when he wasn't, which happened now and then, she was an alertly
reasonable woman, defending him from himself, and wrenching from
his hand, with ironic gayety, or rallying seriousness, the dagger of his
discontent with what he called his "failure" in life--which was what
most people called his success--a business career, chosen because the
support of several inescapable blood relations was not compatible with
his own profession of painting. All his training and hope had been
centered upon art. The fact that, after renouncing it, an admirably
managed cotton mill provided bread and butter for sickly sisters and
wasteful brothers, to say nothing of