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But the front-door bell rang, and something in Miss Ethel's expression did then pierce her self-engrossment. "Is anything the matter, Miss Ethel?" "No, no." Miss Ethel stood there, pressing her thin hands together striving to speak calmly. "It is only the people to look over the house, I expect." Then she turned round and walked with her head erect across the hall.
Fisher's late property, Ned Silverton, was the rosy victim; and at such moments, as Judy Trenor had once remarked, she felt a peculiar need of distracting her husband's attention. Dorset was as difficult to amuse as a savage; but even his self-engrossment was not proof against Lily's arts, or rather these were especially adapted to soothe an uneasy egoism.
She might be wounded, she might suffer; but she looked beyond the present time, over the desert of her fate to roses of a future that Maurice, in his misery, could not see, in his self-engrossment could not divine. There is no living thing that understands how to wait, that can feel the beauty of patience, as a woman understands and feels.
Even Delight, with her friendship always overclouded with disapproval. Wherever he turned, a woman stood in the way. Yet he could not do without them. He needed them even while he resented them. Then, gradually, into his self-engrossment there penetrated a conviction that all was not well between his father and his mother.
He left the foothills and went back toward the mountain spurs where ridge rises beyond ridge, and at the bottom of ravines rivers lie like yellow threads. Nature held him aloof, an atom leaving no mark upon it, an intruder on its musing self-engrossment. He moved, secure and solitary, seeing no living thing but the game he shot and the hawk hanging poised in the blue.
"Well, the doctor's took sort of cold, got a shiver on him like the ague, and he thought a nip o' whisky'd warm him up." She jumped to her feet. "There!" flinging out the word with the rage of a disregarded prophet, "a chill! I knew it!" In a moment all the self-engrossment of her bashfulness was gone.
It was not only as kind as before, but it was sometimes unusually and even unnecessary tender, as if she reproached herself for the too frequent and too evident self-engrossment of her thoughts, and wished to intimate to him that, though her brain were absorbed, her heart was still gentle and true.
Perhaps that was just it; they had always something to do, something outside of themselves, in their honest, earnest lives there was little to tempt them to a frivolous self-engrossment. Leslie touched close upon the very help and solution she wanted, as she thought these thoughts. Opposite to her there sat a poor man, to whom there had happened a great misfortune.
"In a month from now you'll wonder why you ever hung around the Street. I have a feeling that you're going to make good down there." And once, when the time for parting was very near, "No matter what happens, keep on believing in yourself. I lost my faith in myself once. It was pretty close to hell." Joe's response showed his entire self-engrossment. "If he dies, I'm a murderer."
As Burr and Madelon, setting forth on their wedding-journey, drove down the village street, they met many whom they knew; and had it not been for their self-engrossment they could not have failed to notice and wonder at the cold greetings they received, and the many averted faces which greeted them not at all.
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