HOUGH Miss Wooster's life had been an unusually happy one, she was, at forty, still prone to believe that the worst was extremely likely to happen.
Each year, when she came back from Europe, she would lean, bravely enough, over the rail, trying to read in the eyes of her brother-in-law, who always came to meet her, with his pockets full of American gold, what was the special disaster that had occurred during her absence.
Rodney Traver was a delightful person to help you through the customs—at once
so good-tempered and so efficient; and usually, by the time this was over. Miss Wooster found herself reassured, and began to think it possible that perhaps her family and friends had struggled through after all. But on the special occasion before us she was aware that even after they had left the docks and were driving uptown her spirit was not completely at rest.
Was something really wrong? Or was Rodney annoyed at the amount of her duties, or shocked at her not having declared the dress she was wearing?
She decided to hazard a direct question.
"How is Helena?"
He did not instantly answer, and in that second's pause Miss Wooster had time to imagine every possible human tragedy that could have overtaken her sister.
"Helena's well, I think," Rodney answered, but his tone did not satisfy her.
She liked her brother-in-law, sincerely and without reserves, and yet thirteen years before she, and others more naturally optimistic, had not felt absolute confidence that the marriage would turn out well.
For Helena was a beauty—not just a pretty woman, but a pure, perfect blonde beauty, whom foreign courts honored and no one ever forgot. The objection to Rodney was not only that he did not offer anything very brilliant in the way either of money or position, but that he insisted on being interested in his own affairs; he was not absolutely selfless, as it was felt the husband of a great beauty, like the husband of a prima donna, ought to be.
And then Miss Wooster had her own private objection, which she hadn't told any one. Helena was too much in love. It was all very well for ordinary, every-day people to be swayed by such considerations—Mildred Wooster herself would have married for no other reason, but she had an undefined feeling that great beauties, like royalties, ought to look a little farther ahead. It seemed to her as if in some way Helena had been false to a career and would be made to regret it.
For Helena's beauty was of an order that made it in a measure a career. There are, as Miss Wooster had long ago noted, two kinds of beauties—the passive and the active, the hoarders and the spenders: those who consider their beauty as an end in itself and those who consider it merely as a means. Helena was of the latter sort. She did not just contribute her appearance as a splendid spectacle. She made it serve to make her a personage, and a personage she certainly was.
Some of Helena's admirers had regretted that Rodney did not seem to be content with one personage in the family, but had, in a quiet sort of way, set out to be at least a person. But as years went by, and the marriage proved to be an uncommonly successful one, all these criticisms died away, and only an observer as determinedly apprehensive as Miss Wooster still remembered the old doubts.
She was much relieved on arriving at the house to find Helena much as usual. The first fifteen minutes went beautifully; the first hour not so well. And after this everything began to look so black that the first instant she was alone with her sister she turned to her and asked:
"Helena, what in the world is the matter?"
This question is met in but one way by those who do not intend to answer it. Helena allowed her eyes to dwell on her sister as if far away she could just hear a strange but unimportant sound, and then she said:
"With me? Why, nothing at all."
But of course Miss Wooster was not deceived. Helena was depressed, was indeed much more than that—she lived in a sort of fog, an icy mist surrounded her. There was something careful and mechanical in every gesture and expression. The very tone of her voice was indefinably different.
At the end of a day or two Miss Wooster, knowing that her imagination had sometimes led her astray, spoke to her brother-in-law, hoping that he would tell her the nightmare did not exist. But no such comfort was to be hers.