The Letter of the Contract | Page 2

it filled her imagination with a blissful, pitying pain to think
that other women suffered.
The pity was sincere, and the bliss came from the knowledge of her
security. She felt it wonderful to have such a sense of safety as that she
experienced in gazing across the street at the girl's wistful face. It was
like the overpowering thankfulness with which a man on a rock looks
on while others drown. It wasn't callousness; it was only an
appreciation of mercies. She was genuinely sorry for the girl, if the girl

needed sorrow; but she didn't see what she could do to help her. It was
well known that out in that life of New York--and of the world at
large--there were tempests of passion in which lives were wrecked; but
from them she herself was as surely protected by her husband's love as,
in her warm and well-stored house, she was shielded from hunger and
the storm. She accepted this good fortune meekly and as a special
blessedness; but she couldn't help rejoicing all the more in the
knowledge of her security.
The knowledge of her security gave luxury to the sigh with which she
turned in the course of a few minutes to write her note. The desk stood
under the mirror between the two windows at the end of the small back
drawing-room. The small back drawing-room projected as an ell from
the larger one that crossed the front of the house. She had just reached
the words, "shall have great pleasure in accepting your kind invitation
to--" when she heard her husband's step on the stairs. He was coming
up from his solitary breakfast. She could hear, too, the rustle of the
newspaper in his hand as he ascended, softly and tunelessly whistling.
The sound of that whistling, which generally accompanied his presence
in the house, was more entrancing to her than the trill of nightingales.
The loneliness her fancy ascribed to the girl over by the Park
emphasized her sense of possession. She raised her head and looked
into the mirror. The miracle of it struck her afresh, that the great, strong
man she saw entering the room, with his brown velvet house-jacket and
broad shoulders and splendid head, should be hers. She herself was a
little woman, of soft curves and dimpling smiles and no particular
beauty; and he had stooped, in his strength and tenderness, to make her
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, as she had become. And he had
become bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. She was no more his
than he was hers. That was the great fact. She was no longer content
with the limited formula, "They twain shall be one flesh"; they twain
had become one spirit and one life.
It was while asserting this to herself, not for the first time, that she saw
him start. He started back from the window--the large central
window--to which he had gone, probably with vague thoughts of the

weather, like herself. It was the manner of his start that chiefly attracted
her attention. After drawing back he peered forward. It was an absurd
thing to think of him; she knew that--of him of all people!--but one
would almost have said that, in his own house, he shrank from being
seen. But there was the fact. There was his attitude--his tiptoeing--his
way of leaning toward the mantelpiece at an angle from which he could
see what was going on in the Park and yet be protected by the curtain.
Then it came to her, with a flush that made her tingle all over, that she
was spying on him. He thought her in the children's room up-stairs,
when all the while she was watching him in a mirror. Never in her life
had she known such a rush of shame. Bending her head, she scribbled
blindly, "dinner on Tuesday evening the twenty-fourth at--" She was
compelled by an inner force she didn't understand to glance up at the
mirror again, but, to her relief, he had gone.
Later she heard him at the telephone. To avoid all appearance of
listening she went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day. On her
return he was in the hall, dressed for going out. Scanning his face, she
thought he looked suddenly care-worn.
"I've ordered a motor to take me downtown," he explained, as he pulled
on his gloves. He generally took the street-car in Madison Avenue.
"Aren't you well?" she thought it permissible to ask.
"Oh yes; I'm all right."
"Then why--?"
He made an effort to be casual: "Well, I just thought I would."
She had decided not to question him--it was a matter of honor or pride
with her, she was not