CHAPTER VII

One Sunday afternoon some time after this they were sailing the summer seas in their dream yacht, and reclining in lazy luxury under the awning of the after-deck.  There was silence, for each was busy with his own thoughts.  These seasons of silence had insensibly been growing more and more frequent of late; the old nearness and cordiality were waning.  Sally’s terrible revelation had done its work; Aleck had tried hard to drive the memory of it out of her mind, but it would not go, and the shame and bitterness of it were poisoning her gracious dream life.  She could see now (on Sundays) that her husband was becoming a bloated and repulsive Thing.  She could not close her eyes to this, and in these days she no longer looked at him, Sundays, when she could help it.

But she—­was she herself without blemish?  Alas, she knew she was not.  She was keeping a secret from him, she was acting dishonorably toward him, and many a pang it was costing her.  She was breaking the compact, and concealing it from him.  Under strong temptation she had gone into business again; she had risked their whole fortune in a purchase of all the railway systems and coal and steel companies in the country on a margin, and she was now trembling, every Sabbath hour, lest through some chance word of hers he find it out.  In her misery and remorse for this treachery she could not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was filled with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and contented, and ever suspecting.  Never suspecting—­trusting her with a perfect and pathetic trust, and she holding over him by a thread a possible calamity of so devastating a—­

“Say—­Aleck?”

The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself.  She was grateful to have that persecuting subject from her thoughts, and she answered, with much of the old-time tenderness in her tone: 

“Yes, dear.”

“Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake—­that is, you are.  I mean about the marriage business.”  He sat up, fat and froggy and benevolent, like a bronze Buddha, and grew earnest.  “Consider—­it’s more than five years.  You’ve continued the same policy from the start:  with every rise, always holding on for five points higher.  Always when I think we are going to have some weddings, you see a bigger thing ahead, and I undergo another disappointment. I think you are too hard to please.  Some day we’ll get left.  First, we turned down the dentist and the lawyer.  That was all right —­it was sound.  Next, we turned down the banker’s son and the pork-butcher’s heir—­right again, and sound.  Next, we turned down the Congressman’s son and the Governor’s—­right as a trivet, I confess it.  Next the Senator’s son and the son of the Vice-President of the United States—­perfectly