CHAPTER V

The flat in East Twenty-sixth Street was not what Martie’s lonely dreams had fashioned, but she accepted it with characteristic courage and made it a home.  She had hoped for something irregular, old-fashioned:  big rooms, picturesque windows, picturesque inconveniences, interesting neighbours.

She found five rooms in a narrow, eight-story, brick apartment-house; a narrow parlour with a cherry mantel and green tiles, separated from a narrow bedroom by closed folding doors, a narrow, long hall passing a dark little bathroom and the tiny dark room that Teddy had, a small dining room finished in black wood and red paper, and, wedged against it, a strip of kitchen.

These were small quarters after the airy bareness of the Curley home, and they were additionally reduced in effect by the peculiar taste their first occupant had shown in furnishing.  The walls were crowded with heavily framed pictures, coloured photographs of children in livid pink and yellow gowns dancing to the music played by draped ladies at grand pianos; kittens in hats, cheap prints of nude figures, with ugly legends underneath.  The chairs were of every period ever sacrificed to flimsy reproduction:  gilt, Mission, Louis XIV, Pembroke, and old English oak.  There were curtains, tassels, fringes, and portieres everywhere, of cotton brocade, velours, stencilled burlap, and “art” materials generally.  There was a Turkish corner, with a canopy, daggers, crescents, and cushions.  The bookcase in the parlour and the china cabinet in the dining room were locked.  The latter was so large, and the room it adorned so small, that it stood at an angle, partly shutting out the light of the one window.  Every room except the parlour opened upon an air-well, spoken of by the agent as “the court.”  The rent was fifty dollars, and Wallace considered the place a bargain.

For the first day or two Martie laughed bravely at her surroundings, finding in this vase or that picture cause for great amusement.  She promised herself that she would store some of these horrors, but inasmuch as there was not a spare inch in the flat for storage, it was decidedly simplest to leave them where they were.  Wallace did not mind them, and Wallace’s happiness was her aim in life.

But, strangely, after the first excitement of his return was over, a cool distaste descended upon her.  Before the first weeks of the new life were over, she found herself watching her husband with almost hostile eyes.  It must be wrong for a wife to feel so abysmal—­so overwhelming an indifference toward the man whose name she bore.  Wallace, weary with the moving, his collar off, his thick neck bare, his big pale face streaked with drying perspiration, was her husband after all.  She was angry at herself for noticing that his sleek hair was thinning, that the old look of something not fine was stamped more deeply upon his face.  She resolutely suppressed the deepening resentment that grew under his kisses; kisses scented with alcohol.