That was only some year and a-half ago,--but Isabel, lying there by her sleeping husband and sleeping child, was stark awake and only by assertion happy. She was thinking, persistently, of dust. She loved a delicate cleanliness. Her art was a precise one, her studio a workshop of white paper and fine pointed hard pencils, her painting the mechanical perfection of an even wash of color. And she saw, through the floors and walls and the darkness, the dust in the little shaded parlor--two days' dust at least, and Orchardina is very dusty!--dust in the dining-room gathered since yesterday--the dust in the kitchen--she would not count time there, and the dust--here she counted it inexorably--the dust of eight days in her great, light workroom upstairs. Eight days since she had found time to go up there.
Lying there, wide-eyed and motionless, she stood outside in thought and looked at the house--as she used to look at it with him, before they were married. Then, it had roused every blessed hope and dream of wedded joy--it seemed a casket of uncounted treasures. Now, in this dreary mood, it seemed not only a mere workshop, but one of alien tasks, continuous, impossible, like those set for the Imprisoned Princess by bad fairies in the old tales. In thought she entered the well-proportioned door--the Gate of Happiness--and a musty smell greeted her--she had forgotten to throw out those flowers! She turned to the parlor--no, the piano keys were gritty, one had to clean them twice a day to keep that room as she liked it.
From room to room she flitted, in her mind, trying to recall the exquisite things they meant to her when she had planned them; and each one now opened glaring and blank, as a place to work in--and the work undone.
“If I were an abler woman!” she breathed. And then her common sense and common honesty made her reply to herself: “I am able enough--in my own work! Nobody can do everything. I don't believe Edgar'd do it any better than I do.--He don't have to!”--and then such a wave of bitterness rushed over her that she was afraid, and reached out one hand to touch the crib--the other to her husband.
He awakened instantly. “What is it, Dear?” he asked. “Too tired to sleep, you poor darling? But you do love me a little, don't you?”