The Coming of Bill

She felt a wild impulse to warn him, to explain the real significance of this man whom he classed contemptuously with Clarence Grayling and that absurd little Dana Ferris as somebody of no account. She wanted to cry out to him that she was in danger and that only he could help her. But she could not speak, and Kirk went on in the same tone of half-tolerant contempt:

"Who is he?"

She controlled herself with an effort, and answered indifferently.

"Oh, Basil? Well, you might say he's everything. He plays polo, leads cotillions, yachts, shoots, plays the piano wonderfully—everything. People usually like him very much." She paused. "Women especially."

She had tried to put something into her tone which might serve to awaken him, something which might prepare the way for what she wanted to say—and what, if she did not say it now—when the mood was on her, she could never say. But Kirk was deaf.

"He looks that sort of man," he said.

And, as he said it, the accumulated boredom of the past three hours found vent in a vast yawn.

Ruth set her teeth. She felt as if she had received a blow.

When he spoke again it was on the subject of street-paving defects in New York City. 

* * * * *

It was true, as Ruth had said, that they did not dine with the Baileys every night, but that seemed to Kirk, as the days went on, the one and only bright spot in the new state of affairs. He could not bring himself to treat life with a philosophical resignation. His was not open revolt. He was outwardly docile, but inwardly he rebelled furiously.

Perhaps the unnaturally secluded life which he had led since his marriage had unfitted him for mixing in society even more than nature had done. He had grown out of the habit of mixing. Crowds irritated him. He hated doing the same thing at the same time as a hundred other people.

Like most Bohemians, he was at his best in a small circle. He liked his friends as single spies, not in battalions. He was a man who should have had a few intimates and no acquaintances; and his present life was bounded north, south, east, and west by acquaintances. Most of the men to whom he spoke he did not even know by name.

He would seek information from Ruth as they drove home.

"Who was the pop-eyed second-story man with the bald head and the convex waistcoat who glued himself to me to-night?"

"If you mean the fine old gentleman with the slightly prominent eyes and rather thin hair, that was Brock Mason, the vice-president of consolidated groceries. You mustn't even think disrespectfully of a man as rich as that."

"He isn't what you would call a sparkling talker."

"He doesn't have to be. His time is worth a hundred dollars a minute, or a second—I forget which."

"Put me down for a nickel's worth next time."

And then they began to laugh over Ruth's suggestion that they should save up and hire Mr. Mason for an afternoon and make him keep quiet all the time; for Ruth was generally ready to join him in ridiculing their new acquaintances. She had none of that reverence for the great and the near-great which, running to seed, becomes snobbery.

It was this trait in her which kept alive, long after it might have died, the hope that her present state of mind was only a phase, and that, when she had tired of the new game, she would become the old Ruth of the studio. But, when he was honest with himself, he was forced to admit that she showed no signs of ever tiring of it.

They had drifted apart. They were out of touch with each other. It was not an uncommon state of things in the circle in which Kirk now found himself. Indeed, it seemed to him that the semi-detached couple was the rule rather than the exception.

But there was small consolation in this reflection. He was not at all interested in the domestic troubles of the people he mixed with. His own hit him very hard.

Ruth had criticized little Mrs. Bailey, but there was no doubt that she herself had had her head turned quite as completely by the new life.

The first time that Kirk realized this was when he came upon an article in a Sunday paper, printed around a blurred caricature which professed to be a photograph of Mrs. Kirk Winfield, in which she was alluded to with reverence and gusto as one of society's leading hostesses. In the course of the article reference was made to no fewer than three freak dinners of varying ingenuity which she had provided for her delighted friends.

It was this that staggered Kirk. That Mrs. Bailey should indulge in this particular form of insanity was intelligible. But that Ruth should have descended to it was another thing altogether.

He did not refer to the article when he met Ruth, but he was more than ever conscious of the gap between them—the gap which was widening every day.