CHAPTER XVI

It dawned only gradually on Alice that her husband was developing a surprising tendency. He walked into the life that went on at the Nelson home as if he had been born to it. From an existence absorbed in the pursuit of business he gave himself for the moment to one absorbed in pursuit of the frivolous. Alice wondered how he could find anything in Lottie Nelson and her following to interest him; but her husband had offered two or three unpleasant, even distressing, surprises within as few years and she took this new one with less consternation than if it had been the first.

Yet it was impossible not to feel annoyance. Lottie Nelson, in what she would have termed an innocent way, for she cared nothing for MacBirney, in effect appropriated him, and Alice began to imagine herself almost third in the situation.

Tact served to carry the humiliated wife over some of the more flagrant breaches of manners that Mrs. Nelson did not hesitate at, if they served her caprice. MacBirney became "Walter" to her everywhere. She would call him from the city in the morning or from his bed at night; no hour was too early to summon him and none too late. The invitations to the Nelsons' evenings were extended at first both to Alice and to him. Alice accepted them in the beginning with a hopeless sort of protest, knowing that her husband would go anyway and persuading herself that it was better to go with him. If she went, she could not enjoy herself. Drinking was an essential feature of these occasions and Alice's efforts to avoid it made her the object of a ridicule on Lottie's part that she took no pains to conceal.

It was at these gatherings that Alice began to look with a degree of hope for a presence she would otherwise rather have avoided. Kimberly when he came, which was not often, brought to her a sense of relief because experience had shown that he would seek to shield her from embarrassment rather than to expose her to it.

Lottie liked on every occasion to assume to manage Kimberly together with the other men of her acquaintance. But from being, at first, complaisant, or at least not unruly, Kimberly developed mulish tendencies. He would not, in fact, be managed. When Lottie attempted to force him there were outbreaks. One came about over Alice, she being a subject on which both were sensitive.

Alice, seeking once at the De Castros' to escape both the burden of excusing herself and of drinking with the company, appealed directly to Kimberly. "Mix me something mild, will you, please, Mr. Kimberly?"

Kimberly made ready. Lottie flushed with irritation. "Oh, Robert!" She leaned backward in her chair and spoke softly over her fan. "Mix me something mild, too, won't you?"

He ignored Lottie's first request but she was foolish enough to repeat it. Kimberly checked the seltzer he was pouring long enough to reply to her: "What do you mean, Lottie? 'Mix you something mild!' You were drinking raw whiskey at dinner to-night. Can you never understand that all women haven't the palates of ostriches?" He pushed a glass toward Alice. "I don't know how it will taste."

Lottie turned angrily away.

"Now I have made trouble," said Alice.

"No," answered Kimberly imperturbably, "Mrs. Nelson made trouble for herself. I'm sorry to be rude, but she seems lately to enjoy baiting me."

Kimberly appeared less and less at the Nelsons' and the coolness between him and Lottie increased.

She was too keen not to notice that he never came to her house unless Alice came and that served to increase her pique. Such revenge as she could take in making a follower of MacBirney she took.

Alice chafed under the situation and made every effort to ignore it. When matters got to a point where they became intolerable she uttered a protest and what she dreaded followed--an unpleasant scene with her husband. While she feared that succeeding quarrels of this kind would end in something terrible, they ended, in matter of fact, very much alike. People quarrel, as they rejoice or grieve, temperamentally, and a wife placed as Alice was placed must needs in the end submit or do worse. MacBirney ridiculed a little, bullied a little, consoled a little, promised a little, and urged his wife to give up silly, old-fashioned ideas and "broaden out."

He told her she must look at manners and customs as other people looked at them. When Alice protested against Lottie Nelson's calling him early and late on the telephone and receiving him in her room in the morning--MacBirney had once indiscreetly admitted that she sometimes did this--he declared these were no incidents for grievance. If any one were to complain, Nelson, surely, should be the one. Alice maintained that it was indecent. Her husband retorted that it was merely her way, that Lottie often received Robert Kimberly in this way--though this, so far as Robert was concerned, was a fiction--and that nobody looked at the custom as Alice did. However, he promised to amend--anything, he pleaded, but an everlasting row.

Alice had already begun to hate herself in these futile scenes; to hate the emotion they cost; to hate her heartaches and helplessness. She learned to endure more and more before engaging in them, to care less and less for what her husband said in them, less for what he did after them, less for trying to come to any sort of an understanding with him.

In spite of all, however, she was not minded to surrender her husband willingly to another woman. She even convinced herself that as his wife she was not lively enough and resolved if he wanted gayety he should have it at home. The moment she conceived the notion she threw the gage at Lottie's aggressive head. Dolly De Castro, who saw and understood, warmly approved. "Consideration and peaceable methods are wasted on that kind of a woman. Humiliate her, my dear, and she will fawn at your feet," said Dolly unreservedly.

Alice was no novice in the art of entertaining; it remained only for her to turn her capabilities to account. She made herself mistress now of the telephone appointment, of the motoring lunch, of the dining-room gayety. Nelson himself complimented her on the success with which she had stocked her liquor cabinets.

She conceived an ambition for a wine cellar really worth while and abandoned it only when Robert Kimberly intimated that in this something more essential than ample means and the desire to achieve were necessary. But while gently discouraging her own idea as being impractical, he begged her at the same time to make use of The Towers' cellars, which he complained had fallen wholly into disuse; and was deterred only with the utmost difficulty from sending over with his baskets of flowers from the gardens of The Towers, baskets of wines that Nelson and Doane with their trained palates would have stared at if served by Alice. But MacBirney without these aids was put at the very front of dinner hosts and his table was given a presage that surprised him more than any one else. As a consequence, Cedar Lodge invitations were not declined, unless perhaps at times by Robert Kimberly.

He became less and less frequently a guest at Alice's entertainments, and not to be able to count on him as one in her new activities came after a time as a realization not altogether welcome. His declining, which at first relieved her fears of seeing him too often, became more of a vexation than she liked to admit.

Steadily refusing herself, whenever possible, to go to the Nelsons' she could hear only through her husband of those who frequented Lottie's suppers, and of the names MacBirney mentioned none came oftener than that of Robert Kimberly. Every time she heard it she resented his preferring another woman's hospitalities, especially those of a woman he professed not to like.

Mortifying some of her own pride she even consented to go at times to the Nelsons' with her husband to meet Kimberly there and rebuke him. Then, too, she resolved to humiliate herself enough to the hateful woman who so vexed her to observe just how she made things attractive for her guests; reasoning that Kimberly found some entertainment at Lottie's which he missed at Cedar Lodge.

Being in the fight, one must win and Alice meant to make Lottie Nelson weary of her warfare. But somehow she could not meet Robert Kimberly at the Nelsons'. When she went he was never there. Moreover, at those infrequent intervals in which he came to her own house he seemed ill entertained. At times she caught his eye when she was in high humor herself--telling a story or following her guests in their own lively vein--regarding her in a curious or critical way; and when in this fashion things were going at their best, Kimberly seemed never quite to enter into the mirth.

His indifference annoyed her so that as a guest she would have given him up. Yet this would involve a social loss not pleasant to face. Her invitations continued, and his regrets were frequent. Alice concluded she had in some way displeased him.