Five seconds passed in silence, then Lora suddenly fired a question.
“Timmie, why do you think I came here for you tonight?”
“Because you missed me,” he replied moodily.
“Worse than that. Because I couldn’t live without you. I know now, because I’ve tried it.”
She rose from her chair, crossed to his side and laid a hand on his arm. “Listen, dear.” He stirred uneasily. “No, don’t move. I’m not going to make love to you, and I don’t want to argue. I just want to ask you once more to come home with me, and tell you why.
“Last night I nearly cried my eyes out. I was miserable and unhappy and I couldn’t go to sleep. I tried for hours, and then I got up and went to your room and cried all over your pillow. I don’t know whether I love you or not, but I do know that unless you come home with me I don’t want to live. You said something just now — I know I’m not a lawyer; that is, your kind of a lawyer. I found it out last night. I’ll admit I’d hate to give up my office, because there are parts of the work I love. But — couldn’t we make it Warner & Warner? Of course, the first Warner would be you. Or even” — she smiled — “Warner & Wife.”
It would seem that so extended and gracious a speech as that would deserve a careful and thoughtful answer. But Mr. Warner appeared to think otherwise. All he said was:
“Why did you cry last night?”
“Because I wanted you. I wanted you worse than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.”
“And you — cried on my pillow?”
“Yes.”
“Which one? The one on the outside?”
“Yes. It seemed to bring me nearer to you. I kissed it, too. I... I wished it was you, Timmie. Wasn’t I silly?”
“No.” Something seemed to be wrong with Mr. Warner’s voice. “No, I don’t think you were silly.”
Jonathan Stannard’s Secret Vice
When Mrs. Stannard saw her husband with a woman in a yellow hat one night at Courin’s Restaurant, she thought she had solved the mystery which was making her life miserable. Then, watching from her secluded corner, she had seen a tall, middle-aged man with a brown mustache walk over to their table and join them.
Him she recognized. So her husband had not lied to her, after all, when he had said that he was going to dine that evening with John Dupont, of the Academy.
And she was further assured when he observed casually, in their own home three hours later:
“By the way, Dupont brought his wife along. Did you ever see her?”
“No,” replied Mrs. Stannard.
“Nice-looking woman, but a bit flashy. Had on a lot of yellow stuff. Dupont’s getting to be tiresome. I wished myself at home with you. What did you do with yourself all evening?”
She murmured something about reading, thereby achieving her second falsehood within sixty seconds.
But though her husband thus stood acquitted of this particular malfeasance, the mystery remained. It was not of long standing. She had married Jonathan Stannard twelve years before, when he was still an underprofessor at the university.
Three years later he had become suddenly famous by his lengthy essay, “The New Homer.” Others had followed; his reputation grew and solidified; and since he was financially independent he had been able to give up his professorship and devote himself entirely to writing.
He was a conservative.
Classicism was his sacred word. His books and lectures were divided into two equal parts: appreciations of the classic and attacks on the modern; the latter were the most interesting, for he was a hard hitter.
He could belabor the Futurists or motion pictures or Eugene Brieux for three hundred pages, with what effect! Assuredly not in vain, for he was taken seriously.
As a husband he was as near perfection as any reasonable woman could expect. He had never neglected his wife; for over eleven years he had even appeared to continue to love her, which is admittedly something unusual in the case of a literary man who hangs around the house all the time. Indeed, for any positive act of his to the contrary, she had every reason to believe that he loved her still.
But there was the mystery.
Though she had previously noticed a rather unusual amount of absence on his part, it had really begun one January evening some six months before. After dinner he had appeared restless, a rare thing with him; and finally, after an hour of books picked up and thrown down again, he had announced abruptly that he had an appointment at the Century Club.
A hasty kiss and he was gone.
Two hours later, about eleven in the evening, an important message had come for him and she had telephoned the club, only to be told that he had not been there. That was all very well; men do change their minds. But when he returned shortly before midnight he replied to her question:
“Why, I’ve been at the club. I said I was going there, didn’t I?”
“That’s odd,” said Mrs. Stannard. “I called up to give you Selwyn’s message and they said you hadn’t been there all evening.”
“Absurd!” he exclaimed. “Of course I was there! Why, of course I was there! If they had only searched properly—”
But his wife, noting his ill-concealed embarrassment, felt the shadow of doubt enter her mind. She entertained it most unwillingly, for she was not of a suspicious nature, and there had been eleven years of mutual trust to justify her confidence in him; so she had almost succeeded in obliterating the incident from her mind when, a week later, something happened to remind her of it.
He had taken tickets for them for a Hofmann recital, and at the last moment a headache had put her on her back, so he had gone off alone. The next morning she had asked him:
“And how was the new Debussy tone poem?”
“Awful,” he replied emphatically, after a second’s hesitation. “The man has no ears or he couldn’t write such stuff.”
And ten minutes later, going through the morning paper, her eye had fallen on the following paragraph:
... Salammbo, the new tone poem by Debussy, which was to have been rendered for the first time in America, was dropped from the program on account of the late arrival of the manuscript, leaving Mr. Hofmann insufficient time to study the composition. A group of Chopin was substituted...
Obviously, her husband had not attended the recital at all! Mrs. Stannard drew her lips together and hid her face behind the paper to think unseen. Should she confront him with the evidence of his falsehood and demand an explanation? Yes. No.
If he had lied once he would lie again. Useless. Better to hide her knowledge of his guilt. But she found it extremely difficult to hold her tongue, and it was with a sigh of relief that she saw the door close behind him as he went out for his morning stroll.
Her feeling was chiefly one of discomfort, for she could not as yet bring herself to believe that her husband, Jonathan Stannard, the man who above all others stood for rectitude in morals as well as in art, could be guilty of any misdeed.
But he had lied — she pronounced the word aloud in order to get a better hold on it — he had lied to her twice within the week. And now that she thought of it, he had been absent from the house considerably more than usual for the past month or so.
Tuesday afternoon he had gone out at two o’clock and stayed till dinnertime without saying a word of where he had been. Wednesday evening he had gone out for a walk after dinner and returned at a quarter to eleven.
Clearly, he was up to something.
That was her first conclusion. After an hour’s reflection she reached her second, and her eyes flashed as she said it aloud:
“There’s a woman in it somewhere.”