"What's the use!" her husband protested. "They'll only get up and go."
He could not understand the amount of earnest attention and real feeling that his wife put into these things—her pride to have her small domain somewhat resemble the more affluent ones that she admired. Though her family had been decidedly plain, they had given her "advantages" in education and dress, and her own prettiness, her vivacity and charm, had won her way into whatever society Kansas City and Denver could offer. She had also visited here and there in different parts of the country—once in New York, and again at a cottage on the New England coast where there were eight servants, a yacht, and horses. These experiences of luxury, of an easy and large social life, she had absorbed through every pore. With that marvellous adaptability of her race she had quickly formed her ideals of "how people ought to live." It was frequently difficult to carry out these ideals on a circumscribed income, with a husband who cared nothing for appearances, and that was a source of constant discontent to Bessie.
"Coming to bed?" she asked her husband, as she looked in vain for the drinking water that the maid was supposed to bring to her bedside at night.
"No," Falkner answered shortly. "I've got to make out those estimates somehow before morning. If you will have people all the time—"
Bessie turned in at her door shrugging her shoulders. Rob was in one of his "cross" moods—overworked, poor boy! She slowly began to undress before the mirror, thinking of Isabelle Lane's stylish figure and her perfect clothes. "She must have lots of money," she reflected, "and so nice and simple! He's attractive, too. Rob is foolish not to like them. He showed his worst side to-night. If he wants to get on—why, they are the sort of people he ought to know." Her husband's freakish temper gave her much trouble, his unexpectedly bearish moods when she was doing her very best for him, "bringing him out" as she put it, making the right kind of friends—influential ones, so that he might have some chance in the scramble for the good things of life. Surely that was a wife's part. Bessie was satisfied that she had done much for her husband in this way, developed him socially; for when he rode up to the mountain hotel, he was solitary, moody, shy. Tonight he hadn't kissed her—in fact hadn't done so for several days. He was tired by the prolonged heat, she supposed, and worried about the bills. He was always worried about expenses.
As the clothes slipped from her still shapely figure, she stood before the glass, thinking in a haze of those first lover-days that had departed so soon. Now instead of petting her, Rob spent his hours at home upstairs in his attic workroom, doing extra work or reading. Could it be that he was growing tired of her, so soon, in four years? She glanced over her shoulder at her pretty arms, her plump white neck reflected in the glass, and smiled unconsciously with assurance. Oh, he would come back to the lover-mood—she was still desirable! And as the smile curved her lip she thought, "I married him for love!" She was very proud of that. …
The house was now deliciously cool and quiet. Bessie sank into her bed with a sigh, putting out one hand for a magazine and turning on the electric light beside the bed. It had been a tiresome day, with the supper to bring off. There had been six courses, and everything had been very nice. The black cook she had engaged to prepare the meal was a treasure, could serve a better dinner than Mrs. Fraser's or Mrs. Adams's. She herself had made the salad and prepared the iced grape-fruit. Every limb ached—she was always so tired. She loved this last quiet hour of the day that she had by herself, now that the nurse took both the children. With her delicate health the nurse had been a necessity. She usually looked blooming and rosy, but was always tired, always had been as long as she could remember. The doctor had told Falkner after the second child came that his wife would always be a delicate woman, must be carefully protected, or she would collapse and have the fearful modern disease of nerves. So Falkner had insisted on having the best nurse obtainable to relieve her from the wearing nights—though it meant that somehow eighteen hundred dollars must grow of itself!
As midnight sounded from the court-house clock, Bessie laid down the magazine and stretched her tired limbs, luxuriating in the comfort of her soft bed. The story she had been reading was sentimental—the love of a cowboy for the fair daughter of a railroad president. She longed for the caresses of her cow-boy lover, and wondered dreamily if Lane were a devoted husband. He seemed so; but all men were probably alike: their first desires gratified, they thought of other things. So she put out the light and closed her eyes, in faint discontent with life, which was proving less romantic than she had anticipated.
She had her own room. At first it had held two beds, her husband sharing the room with her. But as the house was large he had taken a room on the third story. Nowadays, as Bessie knew, the better sort of American household does not use the primitive double bed. For hygiene and comfort enlightened people have taken to separate beds, then separate quarters. A book might be written on the doing away of the conjugal bed in American life! There should be interesting observations on the effect of this change, social, and hygienic, and moral—oh, most interesting! … A contented smile at last stole over the young wife's face. Was she dreaming of her babies, of those first days of love, when her husband never wished her out of his sight, or simply of the well-ordered, perfectly served, pretty supper that she had given for the Lanes whom she was most anxious to know well? The supper had quite met her aspirations except in the matter of caps and aprons, had satisfied her cherished ideal of how "nice people" lived in this world.
That ideal is constantly expanding these days. In America no one is classed by birth or profession. All is to make, and the women with their marvellous powers of absorption do the shaping. In a thousand ways they learn "how to live as other people do,"—in magazines and on bill boards, in the theatre, the churches, the trains, the illustrated novel. Suggestions how to live!
Meantime upstairs in the mansard room of the old house Falkner was figuring over stresses and strains of an unemotional sort. When past midnight he shoved the papers into the drawer, a familiar thought coursed through his brain: somehow he must sell himself at a dearer price. Living was not cheap even in Torso, and the cost of living was ever going higher, so the papers said and the wives. There were four of them now, a fifth to come in a few months. There should be a third servant, he knew, if they were to live "like other people." With a gesture that said, "Oh, Hell!" he jumped from his chair and took down a volume of verse from the pine shelf above the mantel and lighted a cigarette. For a few minutes he might lose himself and forget the fret of life, in the glowing pictures of things not seen.
The book dropped from his hand. He had carried it in his mountain kit, had read it to Bessie when they were engaged. She had listened, flattered, looking at him and smoothing his hair. But after marriage she confessed flatly that she was not "literary." So they had read together a book of travels, then a novel, then a magazine, and latterly nothing. Taking another cigarette, the man read on, and before his tired eyes rose the purple peaks of the Rockies, the shining crests of snow, the azure sky. And also a cabin in a green meadow beside a still mountain lake, and a woman fair and tall and straight, with blue eyes and a caressing hand—a child on one arm. But Bessie was sleeping downstairs. Putting out his light, the man went to bed.
The man on horseback riding up the trail to look into the girl's eyes that summer afternoon!
CHAPTER VII
The two young wives quickly became very intimate. They spent many mornings together "reading," that is, they sat on the cool west veranda of the Lanes's house, or less often on the balcony at the Falkners's, with a novel turned down where their attention had relaxed, chatting and sewing. Isabelle found Bessie Falkner "cunning," "amusing," "odd," and always "charming." She had "an air about her," a picturesque style of gossip that she used when instructing Isabelle in the intricacies of Torso society. Isabelle also enjoyed the homage that Bessie