“Y
OU idiot!” said his wife, and threw down her cards.
I turned my head away quickly, to avoid seeing Hayley Delane’s face; though why I wished to avoid it I could not have told you, much less why I should have imagined (if I did) that a man of his age and importance would notice what was happening to the wholly negligible features of a youth like myself.
I turned away so that he should not see how it hurt me to hear him called an idiot, even in joke—well, at least half in joke;
{4}
 yet I often thought him an idiot myself, and bad as my own poker was, I knew enough of the game to judge that his—when he wasn’t attending—fully justified such an outburst from his wife. Why her sally disturbed me I couldn’t have said; nor why, when it was greeted by a shrill guffaw from her “latest,” young Bolton Byrne, I itched to cuff the little bounder; nor why, when Hayley Delane, on whom banter always dawned slowly but certainly, at length gave forth his low rich gurgle of appreciation—why then, most of all, I wanted to blot the whole scene from my memory. Why?
There they sat, as I had so often seen them, in Jack Alstrop’s luxurious bookless library (I’m sure the rich rows behind the glass doors were hollow), while beyond the windows the pale twilight thickened to blue over Long Island lawns
{5}
 and woods and a moonlit streak of sea. No one ever looked out at that, except to conjecture what sort of weather there would be the next day for polo, or hunting, or racing, or whatever use the season required the face of nature to be put to; no one was aware of the twilight, the moon or the blue shadows—and Hayley Delane least of all. Day after day, night after night, he sat anchored at somebody’s poker-table, and fumbled absently with his cards....
Yes; that was the man. He didn’t even (as it was once said of a great authority on heraldry) know his own silly business; which was to hang about in his wife’s train, play poker with her friends, and giggle at her nonsense and theirs. No wonder Mrs. Delane was sometimes exasperated. As she said, she hadn’t asked him to marry her! Rather not: all their contemporaries
{6}
 could remember what a thunderbolt it had been on his side. The first time he had seen her—at the theater, I think: “Who’s that? Over there—with the heaps of hair?”—“Oh, Leila Gracy? Why, she’s not really pretty....” “Well, I’m going to marry her—” “Marry her? But her father’s that old scoundrel Bill Gracy ... the one....” “I’m going to marry her....” “The one who’s had to resign from all his clubs....” “I’m going to marry her....” And he did; and it was she, if you please, who kept him dangling, and who would and who wouldn’t, until some whipper-snapper of a youth, who was meanwhile making up his mind about her, had finally decided in the negative.
Such had been Hayley Delane’s marriage; and such, I imagined, his way of conducting most of the transactions of his futile clumsy life.... Big bursts of im
{7}
pulse—storms he couldn’t control—then long periods of drowsing calm, during which, something made me feel, old regrets and remorses woke and stirred under the indolent surface of his nature. And yet, wasn’t I simply romanticizing a commonplace case? I turned back from the window to look at the group. The bringing of candles to the card-tables had scattered pools of illumination throughout the shadowy room; in their radiance Delane’s harsh head stood out like a cliff from a flowery plain. Perhaps it was only his bigness, his heaviness and swarthiness—perhaps his greater age, for he must have been at least fifteen years older than his wife and most of her friends; at any rate, I could never look at him without feeling that he belonged elsewhere, not so much in another society as in another age. For there was no doubt that the so
{8}
ciety he lived in suited him well enough. He shared cheerfully in all the amusements of his little set—rode, played polo, hunted and drove his four-in-hand with the best of them (you will see, by the last allusion, that we were still in the archaic ’nineties). Nor could I guess what other occupations he would have preferred, had he been given his choice. In spite of my admiration for him I could not bring myself to think it was Leila Gracy who had subdued him to what she worked in. What would he have chosen to do if he had not met her that night at the play? Why, I rather thought, to meet and marry somebody else just like her. No; the difference in him was not in his tastes—it was in something ever so much deeper. Yet what is deeper in a man than his tastes?
In another age, then, he would probably have been doing the equivalent of what
{9}
 he was doing now: idling, taking much violent exercise, eating more than was good for him, laughing at the same kind of nonsense, and worshipping, with the same kind of dull routine-worship, the same kind of woman, whether dressed in a crinoline, a farthingale, a peplum or the skins of beasts—it didn’t much matter under what sumptuary dispensation one placed her. Only in that other age there might have been outlets for other faculties, now dormant, perhaps even atrophied, but which must—yes, really must—have had something to do with the building of that big friendly forehead, the monumental nose, and the rich dimple which now and then furrowed his cheek with light. Did the dimple even mean no more than Leila Gracy?
Well, perhaps it was I who was the idiot, if she’d only known it; an idiot to
{10}
 believe in her husband, be obsessed by him, oppressed by him, when, for thirty years now, he’d been only the Hayley Delane whom everybody took for granted, and was............