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You walked right through her when you put the log on the fire. Is it possible that you didn't see her?" "No, I didn't see anything out of the way." She was plainly frightened. "Where was she standing?" "On the hearthrug in front of Mr. Vanderbridge. To reach the fire you had to walk straight through her, for she didn't move. She didn't give way an inch." "Oh, she never gives way.
It must be dreadful to be treated like that, and before the servants, too. Does she come often?" "There are months and months when she doesn't. I can always tell by the way Mrs. Vanderbridge picks up. You wouldn't know her, she is so full of life the very picture of happiness.
The roast had been served, and I was in the act of helping myself to potatoes, when I became aware that Mr. Vanderbridge had again fallen into his reverie. This time he scarcely seemed to hear his wife's voice when she spoke to him, and I watched the sadness cloud his face while he continued to stare straight ahead of him with a look that was almost yearning in its intensity. Again I saw Mrs.
Vanderbridge I had imagined to be a methodical man, and yet the disorder of the desk produced a painful effect on my systematic temperament.
Vanderbridge a secretary who lives in the house?" "No, he hasn't a secretary except at his office. When he wants one at the house, he telephones to his office." "I wondered why she came, for she didn't eat any dinner, and nobody spoke to her not even Mr. Vanderbridge." "Oh, he never speaks to her. Thank God, it hasn't come to that yet." "Then why does she come?
He would think of her more than ever," I told myself, "so he shall never see them. He shall never see them if I can prevent it." I believe it occurred to me that Mrs. Vanderbridge would be generous enough to give them to him she was capable of rising above her jealousy, I knew but I determined that she shouldn't do it until I had reasoned it out with her.
Vanderbridge turned away, I had just made a remark to her husband, who appeared to have fallen into a sudden fit of abstraction, and was gazing thoughtfully over his soup-plate at the white and yellow chrysanthemums. It occurred to me, while I watched him, that he was probably absorbed in some financial problem, and I regretted that I had been so careless as to speak to him.
That is the way my first lady used to talk anyhow, and I've never found anybody that could give me a more sensible idea." "And isn't there any way to stop it? What has Mrs. Vanderbridge done?" "Oh, she can't do anything now. It has got beyond her, though she has had doctor after doctor, and tried everything she could think of.
"Then you might try talking it over with Mrs. Vanderbridge. It would help her to know that you see her also." But the next morning, when I went down to Mrs. Vanderbridge's room, I found that she was too ill to see me. At noon a trained nurse came on the case, and for a week we took our meals together in the morning-room upstairs.
Vanderbridge, hoping that she would introduce me, but she went on talking rapidly in an intense, quivering voice, without noticing the presence of her guest by so much as the lifting of her eyelashes. Mr. Vanderbridge still sat there, silent and detached, and all the time the eyes of the stranger starry eyes with a mist over them looked straight through me at the tapestry on the wall.
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