herself. That it was she who had changed did not present itself to her
as a possible explanation of the fact that she now felt out of touch
with her husband. All she knew was that they had been linked together
by bonds of sympathy, and were so no longer.
She found Kirk dull. She hated to admit it, but the truth forced itself
upon her. He had begun to bore her.
She collected her thoughts and answered his question.
"Basil Milbank? Oh, I should call him unique."
She felt a wild impulse to warn him, to explain the real significance
of this man whom he classed contemptuously with Clarence Grayling and
that absurd little Dana Ferris as somebody of no account. She wanted to
cry out to him that she was in danger and that only he could help her.
But she could not speak, and Kirk went on in the same tone of
half-tolerant contempt:
"Who is he?"
She controlled herself with an effort, and answered indifferently.
"Oh, Basil? Well, you might say he's everything. He plays polo, leads
cotillions, yachts, shoots, plays the piano wonderfully, everything.
People usually like him very much." She paused. "Women especially."
She had tried to put something into her tone which might serve to
awaken him, something which might prepare the way for what she wanted
to say, and what, if she did not say it now, when the mood was on her,
she could never say. But Kirk was deaf.
"He looks that sort of man," he said.
And, as he said it, the accumulated boredom of the past three hours
found vent in a vast yawn.
Ruth set her teeth. She felt as if she had received a blow.
When he spoke again it was on the subject of street-paving defects in
New York City.
* * * * *
It was true, as Ruth had said, that they did not dine with the Baileys
every night, but that seemed to Kirk, as the days went on, the one and
only bright spot in the new state of affairs. He could not bring
himself to treat life with a philosophical resignation. His was not
open revolt. He was outwardly docile, but inwardly he rebelled
furiously.
Perhaps the unnaturally secluded life which he had led since his
marriage had unfitted him for mixing in society even more than nature
had done. He had grown out of the habit of mixing. Crowds irritated
him. He hated doing the same thing at the same time as a hundred other
people.
Like most Bohemians, he was at his best in a small circle. He liked his
friends as single spies, not in battalions. He was a man who should
have had a few intimates and no acquaintances; and his present life was
bounded north, south, east, and west by acquaintances. Most of the men
to whom he spoke he did not even know by name.
He would seek information from Ruth as they drove home.
"Who was the pop-eyed second-story man with the bald head and the
convex waistcoat who glued himself to me to-night?"
"If you mean the fine old gentleman with the slightly prominent eyes
and rather thin hair, that was Brock Mason, the vice-president of
consolidated groceries. You mustn't even think disrespectfully of a man
as rich as that."
"He isn't what you would call a sparkling talker."
"He doesn't have to be. His time is worth a hundred dollars a minute,
or a second, I forget which."
"Put me down for a nickel's worth next time."
And then they began to laugh over Ruth's suggestion that they should
save up and hire Mr. Mason for an afternoon and make him keep quiet all
the time; for Ruth was generally ready to join him in ridiculing their
new acquaintances. She had none of that reverence for the great and the
near-great which, running to seed, becomes snobbery.
It was this trait in her which kept alive, long after it might have
died, the hope that her present state of mind was only a phase, and
that, when she had tired of the new game, she would become the old Ruth
of the studio. But, when he was honest with himself, he was forced to
admit that she showed no signs of ever tiring of it.
They had drifted apart. They were out of touch with each other. It was
not an uncommon state of things in the circle in which Kirk now found
himself. Indeed, it seemed to him that the semi-detached couple was the
rule rather than the exception.
But there was small consolation in this reflection. He was not at all
interested in the domestic troubles of the people he mixed with. His
own hit him very hard.
Ruth had criticized little Mrs. Bailey, but there was no doubt that she
herself had had her head turned quite as completely by the new life.
The first time that Kirk realized this was when he came upon an article
in a Sunday paper, printed around a blurred caricature which professed
to be a photograph of Mrs. Kirk Winfield, in which she was alluded to
with reverence and gusto as one of society's leading hostesses. In the
course of the article reference was made to no fewer than three freak
dinners of varying ingenuity which she had provided for her delighted
friends.
It was this that staggered Kirk. That Mrs. Bailey should indulge in
this particular form of insanity was intelligible. But that Ruth should
have descended to it was another thing altogether.
He did not refer to the article when he met Ruth, but he was more than
ever conscious of the gap between them, the gap which was widening
every day.
The experiences he had undergone during the year of his wandering had
strengthened Kirk considerably, but nature is not easily expelled; and
the constitutional weakness of character which had hampered him through
life prevented him from making any open protests or appeal. Moreover,
he could understand now her point of view, and that disarmed him.
He saw how this state of things had come about. In a sense, it was the
natural state of things. Ruth had been brought up in certain
surroundings. Her love for him, new and overwhelming, had enabled her
to free herself temporarily from these surroundings and to become
reconciled to a life for which, he told himself, she had never been
intended. Fate had thrown her back into her natural sphere. And now she
revelled in the old environment as an exile revels in the life of the
homeland from which he has been so long absent.
That was the crux of the tragedy. Ruth was at home. He was not. Ruth
was among her own people. He was a stranger among strangers, a prisoner
in a land where men spoke with an alien tongue.
There was nothing to be done. The gods had played one of their
practical jokes, and he must join in the laugh against himself and try
to pretend that he was not hurt.
Chapter V The Real Thing
Kirk sat in the nursery with his chin on his hands, staring gloomily
at William Bannister. On the floor William Bannister played some game
of his own invention with his box of bricks.
They were alone. It was the first time they had been alone together for
two weeks. As a rule, when Kirk paid his daily visit, Lora Delane
Porter was there, watchful and forbidding, prepared, on the slightest
excuse, to fall upon him with rules and prohibitions. To-day she was
out, and Kirk had the field to himself, for Mamie, whose duty it was to
mount guard, and who had been threatened with many terrible things by
Mrs. Porter if she did not stay on guard, had once more allowed her too
sympathetic nature to get the better of her and had vanished.