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He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay
awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of
unnumbered blank evenings. He had formerly taken an occasional evening
at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would fill
with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly
Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again. And in
his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.
He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there
were times when he knew he lied to himself. One fiction, however, he
persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly. It was only that
she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home,
companionship and quiet intelligent talk. She had been restful. Nina was
never restful.
He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. "The Valley"
had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run. The
reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she
gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it. But he
never carried the paper home.
He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York. He
would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her
before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There
were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk
with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of
the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months,
however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.
But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going,
and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance
this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with
Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to
him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally
different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the
contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman
who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy,
surmised even that.
That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past,
he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of
violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have
anything to do with Dick if he turned up.