Helen could not forgive him. Leaving dinner untasted, she sat with burning cheeks in the darkness, mourning over the apostacy of the man who had been her warmest friend.
A MINT OF PHRASES IN HIS BRAIN. Love's Labor's Lost; i.--1.
Dr. Ashton had been in his grave several weeks. Life had gone on much as usual in Boston, with the bickerings of small souls the gaping imitations of the mob, the carping of the self-appointed critics, and the earnest endeavor of the honest and inspired workers, who leaven the lump of modern civilization.
Among the Pagans the nomination of Mr. Calvin to the St. Filipe Club by Arthur Fenton had been received with a bitterness born of a feeling of outraged confidence. They were to-night to meet in Tom Bently's studio, and Fenton, who had no intention of being present, was yet keenly conscious of what the talk there concerning him would be. He was glum and moody at dinner, and Edith, who knew that this was Pagan night, watched him wistfully. She hoped to win him away from friends and acquaintances who seemed to her dangerous. Perfectly honest and ready to lay down her life for her husband, she was yet urging him into paths which he felt it to be degradation to walk, since they led him away from sincerity. She had no means of knowing how his sudden championship of Mr. Calvin was regarded. Her own relations to art had been those of pretty amateurishness. She had been bred to believe in conventionality, and the flavor of Bohemianism alarmed and repelled her.
To-night she had put on her most becoming dress, she had ordered the dinner with especial reference to her husband's tastes, and she exerted herself to be as entertaining and attractive as lay in her power. She even allowed herself the innocent ruse of delaying dinner a little, that it might be later before Arthur could be ready to go out; and when the answer to her timid hope that he was to be at home that evening, was in the affirmative, her foolish, tender heart fluttered with delighted hope that she was influencing him to shake off his irregular associations.
He was rather gloomy and silent all the evening, brooding of the Pagans, from whose meetings he had never before been absent, and of Helen, and what she would think. Edith tried all her arts and wiles to make him forget the pleasure he was losing, and she partly succeeded, since her attentions and endearments chimed in with the train of thought by which he was endeavoring to prove to his own satisfaction that he was the most virtuous of men, and that his swearing allegiance to Philistinism, was a noble example of a transgressor willing to confess and abjure his faults. He accepted his wife's attentions as eminently fitting under the circumstances, and could he have forgotten the Pagans and Helen, he might almost have been comfortable. More than once in the old days he had found it hard to face Mrs. Greyson's clear eyes, which saw so readily through shams, and now while he was able to work himself into a defensive attitude towards all others of his old friends, he felt a horrible humiliation in the consciousness that Helen was sure to know of his course and to understand all its weakness.