The Ragged Lady | Page 8

said his wife.
"Well, she a'n't a baby. I guess you'd find you had your hands full,
takon' a half-grown gul like that to bring up."
"I shouldn't be afraid any," the wife declared. "She has just twined
herself round my heat. I can't get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I
know she's good."
"We'll see how you feel about it in the morning."
The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this
for a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He
seldom talked, but there came times when he would not even listen.
One of these was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later
he had undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed,
as effectively blind and deaf to his wife's appeals as if he were already
asleep.

II.
When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of
the Treasury as a tribute to the statesman's financial policy) went out of
business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most
serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.
He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred
one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do,

she inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they
both needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble
of every kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored
their furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house
in which they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill
street of the West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands,
and let it for a term of years without consulting her. But she had her
way about their own movements, and they began that life of hotels,
which they had now lived so long that she believed any other
impossible. Its luxury and idleness had told upon each of them with
diverse effect.
They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but
she had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he
was not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion
was alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same
medicines Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result.
She was sure that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she
was the one who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the
spectacle of a husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her
health, did not audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight
in such measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out
of storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use
the side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own
dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of
the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a
woman could to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which
they could neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over
with herself before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of
sending them back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring
when the Landers came away for the summer.
They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and
St. Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and
early in the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs,
where Mrs. Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before

going to a Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready
to go down to Florida in January. She would not on any account have
gone directly to the city from the mountains, for people who did that
were sure to lose the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the
winter, if they did not actually come down with a fever.
She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person.
She made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston,
which she still regarded as home, because they had