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"That's not the point," Dick persisted. "I don't mind idle gossip. I
don't give a damn about it. It's the statement itself."
"I should say that you are the only person who knows anything about it."
Dick made a restless, impatient gesture.
"I want to know one thing more," he said. "Nina told you, I suppose.
Does--I suppose Elizabeth knows it, too?"
"I rather think she does."
Dick turned abruptly and went out of the room, and a moment later
Leslie heard the front door slam. Elizabeth, standing at the head of the
stairs, heard it also, and turned away, with a new droop to her usually
valiant shoulders. Her world, too, had gone awry, that safe world of
protection and cheer and kindliness. First had come Nina, white-lipped
and shaken, and Elizabeth had had to face the fact that there were such
things as treachery and the queer hidden things that men did, and that
came to light and brought horrible suffering.
And that afternoon she had had to acknowledge that there was something
wrong with Dick. No. Between Dick and herself. There was a formality in
his speech to her, an aloofness that seemed to ignore utterly their new
intimacy. He was there, but he was miles away from her. She tried hard
to feel indignant, but she was only hurt.
Peace seemed definitely to have abandoned the Wheeler house. Then
late in the evening a measure of it was restored when Nina and Leslie
effected a reconciliation. It followed several bad hours when Nina had
locked her door against them all, but at ten o'clock she sent for Leslie
and faced him with desperate calmness.
To Elizabeth, putting cold cloths on her mother's head as she lay on the
bed, there came a growing conviction that the relation between men and
women was a complicated and baffling thing, and that love and hate were
sometimes close together.
Love, and habit perhaps, triumphed in Nina's case, however, for at
eleven o'clock they heard Leslie going down the stairs and later on
moving about the kitchen and pantry while whistling softly. The servants
had gone, and the air was filled with the odor of burning bread. Some
time later Mrs. Wheeler, waiting uneasily in the upper hall, beheld her
son-in-law coming up and carrying proudly a tray on which was toast of
an incredible blackness, and a pot which smelled feebly of tea.
"The next time you're out of a cook just send for me," he said
cheerfully.
Mrs. Wheeler, full and overflowing with indignation and the piece of her
mind she had meant to deliver, retired vanquished to her bedroom.