ycamores, the recollection of
this amiable condescension returned to me like the stab of a knife. The
image of Sally, mounted on Prince Charlie, at George's side, troubled my
thoughts, and I wondered, with a pang, if the people who saw them
together would ask themselves curiously why she had chosen me. To one
and all of them,--to Miss Mitty, to Bonny Page, to Dr. Theophilus,--the
mystery, I felt, was as obscure to-day as it had been in the beginning
of our love. Why was it? I questioned angrily, and wherein lay the
subtle distinction which divided my nature from George Bolingbroke's and
even from Sally's? The forces of democracy had made way for me, and yet
was there something stronger than democracy--and this something, fine
and invincible as a blade, I had felt long ago in the presence of Miss
Mitty and Miss Matoaca. Over my head, under the spreading boughs of the
sycamore, a window was lifted, and between the parted lace curtains, the
song of Miss Mitty's canary floated out into the street. As the music
entered my thoughts, I remembered suddenly the box of sweet alyssum
blooming on the window-sill under the swinging cage, and there flashed
into my consciousness the meaning of the flowers George had laid beside
Sally's plate. For her sake he had gone to Miss Mitty in the sad old
house, and that little blossom was the mute expression of a service he
had rendered joyfully in the name of love. The gratitude in Sally's eyes
was made clear to me, and a helpless rage at my own blindness, my own
denseness, flooded my heart. George, because of some inborn fineness of
perception, had discerned the existence of a sorrow in my wife to which
I, the man whom she loved and who loved her, had been insensible. He had
understood and had comforted--while I, engrossed in larger matters, had
gone on my way unheeding and indifferent. Then the anger against myself
turned blindly upon George, and I demanded passionately if he would
stand forever in my life as the embodiment of instincts and perceptions
that the generations had bred? Would I fail forever in little things
because I had been cursed at birth by an inability to see any except big
ones? And where I failed would George be always ready to fill the
unspoken need and to bestow the unasked-for sympathy?

CHAPTER XXIII

IN WHICH I WALK ON THIN ICE

On a November evening, when we had been married several years, I came
home after seven o'clock, and found Sally standing before t