THE MISSION OF JANE

I

LETHBURY, surveying his wife across the dinner table, found his transient conjugal glance arrested by an indefinable change in her appearance.

“How smart you look!  Is that a new gown?” he asked.

Her answering look seemed to deprecate his charging her with the extravagance of wasting a new gown on him, and he now perceived that the change lay deeper than any accident of dress.  At the same time, he noticed that she betrayed her consciousness of it by a delicate, almost frightened blush.  It was one of the compensations of Mrs. Lethbury’s protracted childishness that she still blushed as prettily as at eighteen.  Her body had been privileged not to outstrip her mind, and the two, as it seemed to Lethbury, were destined to travel together through an eternity of girlishness.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

Since she never did, he always wondered at her bringing this out as a fresh grievance against him; but his wonder was unresentful, and he said good-humoredly:  “You sparkle so that I thought you had on your diamonds.”

She sighed and blushed again.

“It must be,” he continued, “that you’ve been to a dressmaker’s opening.  You’re absolutely brimming with illicit enjoyment.”

She stared again, this time at the adjective.  His adjectives always embarrassed her:  their unintelligibleness savored of impropriety.

“In short,” he summed up, “you’ve been doing something that you’re thoroughly ashamed of.”

To his surprise she retorted:  “I don’t see why I should be ashamed of it!”

Lethbury leaned back with a smile of enjoyment.  When there was nothing better going he always liked to listen to her explanations.

“Well—?” he said.

She was becoming breathless and ejaculatory.  “Of course you’ll laugh—­you laugh at everything!”

“That rather blunts the point of my derision, doesn’t it?” he interjected; but she rushed on without noticing: 

“It’s so easy to laugh at things.”

“Ah,” murmured Lethbury with relish, “that’s Aunt Sophronia’s, isn’t it?”

Most of his wife’s opinions were heirlooms, and he took a quaint pleasure in tracing their descent.  She was proud of their age, and saw no reason for discarding them while they were still serviceable.  Some, of course, were so fine that she kept them for state occasions, like her great-grandmother’s Crown Derby; but from the lady known as Aunt Sophronia she had inherited a stout set of every-day prejudices that were practically as good as new; whereas her husband’s, as she noticed, were always having to be replaced.  In the early days she had fancied there might be a certain satisfaction in taxing him with the fact; but she had long since been silenced by the reply:  “My dear, I’m not a rich man, but I never use an opinion twice if I can help it.”