His look was eager, yet always serene, and he kept rocking gently. To Stella there seemed in him a horrid new fascination as he hurled forth at her, though so softly and from so cloud-kissed an elevation, this startling avalanche of words. She listened to him with hot flushes. And she could not bid him stop till he had poured out all his heart to her; she could not deprive herself of a single bitter drop.
“After that,” he continued, “I decided to go to Rochester, because I’d found some items in the help wanted columns that looked pretty good. Moving,” he smiled in lambent appreciation, “was no great matter. I didn’t even have a trunk. I just put my things in a paper suitcase and got on the train. In Rochester I found work in a shoe store. It didn’t take me long to catch on, and it turned out to be a very good thing.”
Indeed, it turned out, in quite short order, that fitting shoes was King’s genuine calling. Business actually increased—especially on the feminine side of the establishment. “Ladies came,” he said, with an effect of quiet drollness, “who needed shoes no more than they needed elephants.” There seemed to be a peculiar and overwhelming thrill about the mere way he knelt before them in his superbly fitting clothes. But the odd part of it all was that this enormous fascination was just as natural and spontaneous in him as eating or walking. He became, in a short time, a kind of shoe-fitting matinée idol.
Stella made a vague gesture, but it did not amount to an interruption. She had merely come to a last little climax in her immense disillusion. Almost without realizing it during the past months, with everything else torn asunder in her life, Stella had faintly clung to the thought that there was an aura of martyrdom playing out from her position. Other women before her had married men who, like Ferdinand, had fallen victims to drug. A man might be very brilliant, even an actual prince, for that matter, and still destroy himself with opium. But now the last ounce of sentimental comfort was drowned in her soul by this sudden outburst of confession—which yet was no confession surely, so far as the radiant being before her was concerned. (“It’s all beautiful—isn’t it!” he murmured.) And she saw with an eye of entire disenchantment at last that the man she had married had once been a wax figure in a clothing window, and then a shoe clerk. How could she think of herself as a martyr after that?