character. She's what I call a determined girl. She seems to have made
up her mind that the old crowd that used to trail around the studio
aren't needed any longer, and they've been hitting the sidewalk on one
ear ever since the honeymoon.
"If you want to see her in action, go up there now. She'll be perfectly
sweet and friendly, but somehow you'll get the notion that you don't
want to go there again, and that she can bear up if you don't. It's
something in her manner. I guess it's a trick these society girls
learn. You've seen a bouncer handling a souse. He doesn't rough-house
him. He just puts his arm round his waist and kind of suggests he
should leave the place. Well, it's like that."
"But doesn't Kirk kick? He used to like having us around."
His friend laughed.
"Kick? Kirk? You should see him! He just sits there waiting for you to
go, and, when you do go, shuts the door on you so quick you have to
jump to keep from getting your coat caught in it. I tell you, those two
are about all the company either of them needs. They've got the
Newly-weds licked to a whisper."
"It's always the best fellows that get it the worse," said the other
philosophically, "and it's always the fellows you think are safe too. I
could have bet on Kirk. Six months ago I'd have given you any odds you
wanted that he would never marry."
"And I wouldn't have taken you. It's always the way."
The criticisms of the two thirsty men, though prejudiced, were
accurate. Marriage had undeniably wrought changes in Kirk Winfield. It
had blown up, decentralized, and re-arranged his entire scheme of life.
Kirk's was one of those natures that run to extremes. He had been a
whole-hearted bachelor, and he was assuredly a much-married man. For
the first six months Ruth was almost literally his whole world. His
friends, the old brigade of the studio, had dropped away from him in a
body. They had visited the studio once or twice at first, but after
that had mysteriously disappeared. He was too engrossed in his
happiness to speculate on the reasons for this defection: he only knew
that he was glad of it.
Their visits had not been a success.
Conversation had flowed fitfully. Some sixth sense told him that Ruth,
though charming to them all, had not liked them; and he himself was
astonished to find what bull dogs they really were. It was odd how out
of sympathy he felt with them. They seemed so unnecessary: yet what a
large part of his life they had once made up!
Something had come between him and them. What it was he did not know.
Ruth could have told him. She was the angel with the flaming sword who
guarded their paradise. Marriage was causing her to make unexpected
discoveries with regard to herself. Before she had always looked on
herself as a rather unusually reasonable, and certainly not a jealous,
woman. But now she was filled with an active dislike for these quite
harmless young men who came to try and share Kirk with her.
She knew it was utterly illogical. A man must have friends. Life could
not be forever a hermitage of two. She tried to analyse her objection
to these men, and came to the conclusion that it was the fact that they
had known Kirk before she did that caused it.
She made a compromise with herself. Kirk should have friends, but they
must be new ones. In a little while, when this crazy desire to keep
herself and him alone together in a world of their own should have left
her, they would begin to build up a circle. But these men whose
vocabulary included the words "Do you remember?" must be eliminated one
and all.
Kirk, blissfully unconscious that his future was being arranged for him
and the steering-wheel of his life quietly taken out of his hands,
passed his days in a state of almost painful happiness. It never
crossed his mind that he had ceased to be master of his fate and
captain of his soul. The reins were handled so gently that he did not
feel them. It seemed to him that he was travelling of his own free will
along a pleasant path selected by himself.
He saw his friends go from him without a regret. Perhaps at the bottom
of his heart he had always had a suspicion of contempt for them. He had
taken them on their surface value, as amusing fellows who were good
company of an evening. There was not one of them whom he had ever known
as real friends know each other , not one, except Hank Jardine; and
Hank had yet to be subjected to the acid test of the new conditions.
There were moments when the thought of Hank threw a shadow across his
happiness. He could let these others go, but Hank was different. And
something told him that Ruth would not like Hank.
But these shadows were not frequent. Ruth filled his life too
completely to allow him leisure to brood on possibilities of future
trouble.
Looking back, it struck him that on their wedding-day they had been
almost strangers. They had taken each other blindly, trusting to
instinct. Since then he had been getting to know her. It was
astonishing how much there was to know. There was a fresh discovery to
be made about her every day. She was a perpetually recurring miracle.
The futility of his old life made him wince whenever he dared think of
it. How he had drifted, a useless log on a sluggish current!
He was certainly a whole-hearted convert. As to Saul of Tarsus, so to
him there had come a sudden blinding light. He could hardly believe
that he was the same person who had scoffed at the idea of a man giving
up his life to one woman and being happy. But then the abstract wife
had been a pale, bloodless phantom, and Ruth was real.
It was the realness of her that kept him in a state of perpetual
amazement. To see her moving about the studio, to touch her, to look at
her across the dinner-table, to wake in the night and hear her
breathing at his side.... It seemed to him that centuries might pass,
yet these things would still be wonderful.
And always in his heart there was the gratitude for what she had done
for him. She had given up everything to share his life. She had weighed
him in the balance against wealth and comfort and her place among the
great ones of the world, and had chosen him. There were times when the
thought filled him with a kind of delirious pride: times, again, when
he felt a grateful humility that made him long to fall down and worship
this goddess who had stooped to him.
In a word, he was very young, very much in love, and for the first time
in his life was living with every drop of blood in his veins.
* * * * *
Hank returned to New York in due course. He came to the studio the same
night, and he had not been there five minutes before a leaden weight
descended on Kirk's soul. It was as he had feared. Ruth did not like
him.
Hank was not the sort of man who makes universal appeal. Also, he was
no ladies' man. He was long and lean and hard-bitten, and his supply of
conventional small talk was practically non-existent. To get the best
out of Hank, as has been said, you had to let him take his coat off and
put his feet up on the back of a second chair and reconcile yourself to
the pestiferous brand of tobacco which he affected.
Ruth conceded none of these things. Throughout the interview Hank sat
bolt upright, tucking a pair of shoes of the dreadnought class coyly
underneath his chair, and drew suspiciously at Turkish cigarettes from
Kirk's case. An air of constraint hung over the party. Again and again
Kirk hoped that Hank would embark on the epic of his life, but shyness