It was indubitably at times a most unlucky gift. With his reappearance and success the flood-gates of his past were opened, and there gushed forth a Niagara of malignant chatter. His amours, his fights, his disreputable escapades, his divorce--all were revived. Every one seemed to have a story to his discredit, and to be in haste to get it into print. Nor was his marriage to Phyllis allowed to escape the same soiling publicity, and the tale was embellished with slanders and innuendoes that would have goaded a much more patient man to fury. Adair was with difficulty restrained from knocking editorial teeth down editorial throats; and it showed Phyllis’ power over him, and the change generally in his disposition that the police courts were untroubled by his presence.
Lies about herself Phyllis could bear with some fortitude, but Adair’s earlier life, as thus revealed by the sensation-mongers, cost her many a bitter pang.--The woman who had tried to shoot him at the Café Martin, and the whole revelation of that horrid affair--the Burt-Wauchope scandal, where rather than save himself by compromising an unknown girl, he had gone to prison for contempt; and that, not quietly and nobly, but with a vain-glorious satisfaction in his martyrdom--the discreditable spree on Tim Bartlett’s yacht--how horrible, how unendurable it was--this graveyard resurrection of bygone years!
Adair never justified himself to her, never tried to palliate or explain away the incidents of his outrageous past. That instinct, which in all his relations with her invariably guided him aright, served him as well now as it had always before. He was more gentle, more tender, trusting to kisses rather than words. "Don’t let this hurt you," he once said to her, the only time he had ever ventured to speak to her, "that wasn’t me, Phyllis. There wasn’t any me until you came. You know that, don’t you? No me at all, but just a big brute, and if he didn’t have a soul it was because it was in your bureau drawer along with your stockings and handkerchiefs, and I guess you thought it was a sachet bag or something, and never looked at it twice."
The most jealous, dismayed and heart-sick of women could not have resisted such pleading; not if she were in love, that is, and her lover’s voice was as appealing, and his eyes as convincing and sincere.--In a divine commingling of wife-love and mother-love, so pure, so uplifting that it transcended all physical expression, save alone what the breast could give, she drew his head to her bosom, comforting him, comforting herself in an act emblematic of all that is most beautiful in humanity.