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"I'm going to take a walk," he said briefly, and went out. He always
took a walk when things disturbed him.
On the Sunday afternoon after Dick had gone Elizabeth was alone in her
room upstairs. On the bed lay the sort of gown Nina would have called
a dinner dress, and to which Elizabeth referred as her dark blue. Seen
thus, in the room which was her own expression, there was a certain
nobility about her very simplicity, a steadiness about her eyes that was
almost disconcerting.
"She's the saintly-looking sort that would go on the rocks for some
man," Nina had said once, rather flippantly, "and never know she was
shipwrecked. No man in the world could do that to me."
But just then Elizabeth looked totally unlike shipwreck. Nothing seemed
more like a safe harbor than the Wheeler house that afternoon, or
all the afternoons. Life went on, the comfortable life of an upper
middle-class household. Candles and flowers on the table and a neat
waitress to serve; little carefully planned shopping expeditions; fine
hand-sewing on dainty undergarments for rainy days; small tributes of
books and candy; invitations and consultations as to what to wear; choir
practice, a class in the Sunday school, a little work among the poor;
the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little
house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.
She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady--and serene;
not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams
and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was
waiting.
Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to "do something." A good
many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague
as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being very useful,
and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple
of years before, when she was just eighteen.
"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.
"That's it," she had said despondently. "I don't know. I haven't any
particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on having
you support me in idleness all my life."
"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed,
dryly. "But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't intend
to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation.
You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you're fulfilling
your economic place in the nation. Don't you forget it, either."