..
"Mr. Leroux," said Helen, with all her old firmness--"Garnham is coming
down IMMEDIATELY to put the place in order! And, whilst he is doing so,
you are going to prepare yourself for a decent, Christian dinner!"
Henry Leroux rested one hand upon the table, looking down at the
carpet. He had known for a long time, in a vague fashion, that he lacked
something; that his success--a wholly inartistic one--had yielded him
little gratification; that the comfort of his home was a purely monetary
product and not in any sense atmospheric. He had schooled himself to
believe that he liked loneliness--loneliness physical and mental, and
that in marrying a pretty, but pleasure-loving girl, he had insured an
ideal menage. Furthermore, he honestly believed that he worshiped
his wife; and with his present grief at her unaccountable silence was
mingled no atom of reproach.
But latterly he had begun to wonder--in his peculiarly indefinite way
he had begun to doubt his own philosophy. Was the void in his soul a
product of thwarted ambition?--for, whilst he slaved, scrupulously, upon
"Martin Zeda," he loathed every deed and every word of that Old Man of
the Sea. Or could it be that his own being--his nature of Adam--lacked
something which wealth, social position, and Mira, his wife, could not
yield to him?
Now, a new tone in the voice of Helen Cumberly--a tone different from
that compound of good-fellowship and raillery, which he knew--a tone
which had entered into it when she had exclaimed upon the state of the
room--set his poor, anxious heart thrumming like a lute.
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