CHAPTER IV.

One especial Sunday he awakened after a refreshing sleep, stretched his arms and yawned aloud, then lay pleasantly conscious of the well-being of his condition--half asleep still, and it was far into the morning! Belowstairs he could hear the heavy footsteps of Eliza, and fancied the early presage of dinner. Warrener listened, knowing he should soon hear another footstep lighter than that of the maid-of-all-work.

“Gert!”

Mrs. Warrener came in.

“It’s twelve o’clock,” she said, “and you’ll just about have time to get up, take your bath and dress for dinner.”

“All right,” he responded, cheerfully, but did not move. Instead, putting his hands up behind his head, he watched his wife as she fetched out his clean clothes and laid them with his Sunday suit over a chair. As she moved quietly about the room, the man’s feeling of content grew, added to by the feminine presence and the evidence of care and wifely attention. The little room was bright with the sunshine of a mild November day. The chromos, the glaring wall paper, the cheap oak bedroom set, the thin lace curtains touched with the light, appeared lovely in their master’s eyes. Before him was the prospect of a long day of repose, spent in perfect, tranquil laziness, a day in the fresh country air. There would be no office or telegraph calls, no duties, no sounds to disturb the hard-earned hours. His relaxed nerves and body rejoiced in the holiday. He was as happy as he could ever be--did he know it, would ever be. Years afterward Warrener looked back at that especial Sunday with something of the same affection he bestowed upon his marriage memories, and with keener regret.

As Mrs. Warrener went out of the room, he called her:

“Say, Gert!”

She paused at the door, clean towels in her hand. She was going to get his bath ready.

“Well, what?”

He wanted to call: “Give me a kiss.” But her manner rather distanced him. So he said: “What’ll you give me if I guess what we’re going to have for dinner?”

“Nothing,” she laughed. “I should think anybody with a nose would know. Eliza leaves the kitchen door open all the time.”

“It smells good,” he sniffed. “And it’s away ahead of sandwiches and a glass of beer; that’s my noon meal, as a rule.”

She warned him he wouldn’t get any dinner at all if he didn’t hurry up, and in a few moments he heard the running of his bath; the sound, to his good humor and contented frame of mind, was one more pleasant, luxurious, agreeable part of the day.

Later, shaved and washed, dressed with great precision and care, he sat in the parlor, the multitudinous sheets of the New York daily papers around him.

Gertrude rocked idly in the window, her eyes on the deserted street. Eliza washed the dinner dishes and put them rattling away, then tramped up the front stairs, and in gorgeous magnificence went out the back way, emerging into Grand Street. At the sight of her Mrs. Warrener said: “I’m going to give you a cold supper, George, some salad and tea--she’s made biscuits, I guess.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It seems as if we only just got up from dinner.” He threw his paper down. “Want to take a walk, Gert? It’s nice out, and I don’t think it’s cold.”

“Well,” she said, indifferently, “I’ll get my hat and coat.”

When she came down Warrener had been walking about his tiny parlor and dining room, and was still under the spell of householder and in love with his possessions.

“You’ve got the McAllister wedding present cleaned up fine.”

“It’s the only real silver we’ve got; it makes the other things look common.”

Mrs. Warrener regarded the display on her buffet with some discontent.

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the husband. “It’s as good as you can get anywhere for the money.”

“The McAllisters have come back to Slocum,” his wife mentioned.

“Yes,” he nodded. “Mrs. McAllister used to go to Uncle Samson’s church. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go up there to call some day.”

Mrs. Warrener had opened the front door and gone out on the stoop; George, getting into his overcoat, followed her. Side by side they went slowly down the front steps of the little wooden stoop.

“I shouldn’t know what to say.”

“Oh, she’ll say it all; besides, perhaps she’ll be out--leave a card--got one of mine?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Well.”

As they turned into Grand Street and hesitated a moment as to their direction, Warrener suggested:

“Might as well walk along up toward the McAllister place; it’s as good a walk as any.”

As they started off in the fresh, crisp air, refreshing and sweet to the man’s nostrils, stimulating and revivifying after his close confined days, a sudden impulse to have the woman by his side nearer him overcame him; he drew her arm through his.

“Let’s walk arm in arm, like old married couples.”

But Mrs. Warrener held back and took her arm away.

“No,” she demurred; “I think it’s common.”

In the following days Mrs. Warrener took up her life, or, more accurately, began it, standing on the threshold of an abyss--the flight of steps before her that led to the new. As she had never been particularly interested in anything, she did not know that she was an invalid with a fatal malady, a malady whose term is too commonly employed by people whose reason for the state is less apparent than this woman’s in a country town. She had never heard the word “boredom” used.

There were half a dozen village friends of Mrs. Warrener’s whose status was on a higher plane than hers, whose houses had more square feet of land around them, whose “help” was more efficient. In their parlors now and then she took an inadequate hand at euchre, and of late she had been trying to learn bridge. These ladies made the town library and the little hospital, the Children’s Home and the church interests, run more or less smoothly; they had a hundred busy, useful interests. They were good wives and good mothers and good citizens. She had never heard any of them use the verb “to be bored,” and if she had, she would not have known what it meant! She suffered under a complaint which, like many maladies, is less fatal so long as it has no name; but the disease was too acute to be ignored. It had engendered too many complications.

At the town library the librarian from among the rows of school books one day handed down to Mrs. Warrener a French dictionary. From the novel she had read a few days before she had copied out this phrase:

_Ennui_ is like the unseen worm in the wood, that slowly gnaws the good, clean substance until his parasite presence is declared by innumerable interstices that finally destroy the wood and proclaim it rotten to the fiber--_ennui_ had eaten into her, devoured her. There was not one inch of her that did not ache from desuetude, from moral inertia.

Gertrude found the word “_ennui_” in the dictionary, and the following definition: “Listlessness, languor, tedium, lassitude, tiresomeness,” compared it with her scrap of paper, puzzled her pretty brows until their lines looked like pain. As she put up the book and left the library, she said to herself: “Well, I guess that’s what’s the matter with me.”