Chapter IX: Mrs. Dodge’s Husband

“SPIRITUAL Life and the New Generation” lay meekly upon Mrs. Dodge’s desk for all the rest of that day, and nothing was added to it. Late in the afternoon Lily consented to take a little beef tea and toast in her room; but she was still uttering intermittent gurgles, like sobs too exhausted for a fuller expression, when her mother brought her tray to her—or perhaps Lily merely renewed the utterance of these sounds at sight of her mother—and all in all the latter had what she called “a day indeed of it!”

So she told Mr. Dodge upon his arrival from his office that evening. “_Haven’t_ I, though!” she added, and gave him so vivid an account that, although he was tired, he got up from his easy chair and paced the floor.

“It comes back to the same old, everlasting question,” he said, when she had concluded. “What does she _see_ in him? What on earth makes her act like that over this moron? There’s the question I don’t believe anybody can answer. She’s always been a fanciful, imaginative girl, but until this thing came over her she appeared to be fairly close to normal. Of course, I supposed she’d fall in love some day, but I thought she’d have a few remnants of reason left when she did. I’ve heard of girls that acted like this, but not many; and I never dreamed ours would be one of that sort. I’d like to know what other parents have done who’ve had daughters get into this state over some absolutely worthless cub like Crabbe Osborne.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Dodge said, helplessly. “I’d ask ’em if I did. I’m sure I’m at my wits’ end about it.”

“We both are. I admit I haven’t the faintest idea how to do anything more intelligent than we’ve been doing—and yet I see where it’s going to end.”

“Where, Roger? Where do you think it’s going to end?”

“They’ve tried twice now,” he said, gloomily. “Last time, if the idiot had taken the precaution to see that there was plenty of gas in his borrowed car before they started, they’d have been married. Some day before long he’ll borrow _enough_ gas, and then she’s going to slip out and meet him again, and they will.”

“No, no!” his wife protested. “I can’t bear to hear you say so.”

“It’ll happen, just the same,” he assured her, grimly. “Nothing on earth that we’ve done has been able to make her see this cub except as an angel—a persecuted angel. She really meant it when she called him that;—on my soul, I believe she did! We’ve told her the truth about him over and over till the repetition makes us sick. What effect does it have on her? We’ve told her what his own father said about him, that he’s ‘absolutely no good on earth and never will be!’ What help was that? Then we tried having other people tell her their opinions of Crabbe. It only made her hate the other people. We’ve tried indulgence; we made the greatest effort to interest her in other things; we’ve tried to get her interested in other young men; we’ve tried giving her anything she wanted; we’ve tried to get her to travel; offered her Europe, Asia, and the whole globe; and then when she wouldn’t go and everything else we tried was no good, we tried taking the whole thing as a joke—making good-natured fun of this cub; trying to make her see him as ridiculous—and the end of that was her first attempt to run away with him! Well, she did it again, and if we keep on as we’re going she’ll do it _again_! What’s our alternative? I ask you!”

His wife could only moan that she didn’t know;—her mind as well as her emotion was exhausted, she said; and the only thing she could suggest now was that he should try to get Lily to come down to dinner. He assented gloomily, “Well, I’ll see, though it makes me sick to listen to her when she’s like this,” and went upstairs to his daughter’s room.

After he had knocked repeatedly upon the door, obtaining only the significant response of silence, he turned the knob, found himself admitted into darkness, and pressed a button upon the wall just inside the door. The light, magically instantaneous, glowed from the apricot-coloured silk shades of two little lamps on slender tables, one at each side of the daintily painted bed;—and upon the soft green coverlet, with her fair and delicate head upon the lace pillow, lay his daughter. With hands pressed palm to palm upon her breast, her attitude was that of a crusader’s lady in stone upon a tomb; and the closed eyes, the exquisite white profile, thin with suffering, the slender, long outline of her figure, could not fail to touch a father’s heart. For the wasting of long-drawn anguish was truly sculptured there, even though the attitude might have been a little calculated.

“Lily,” he said, gently, as he approached the bed, “your mother wants to know if you wouldn’t like to come down to dinner.”

The dark eyelids remained as they were; but the pale lips just moved. “No, thank you.”

“You won’t?”

“No.”

“Then shall we send your dinner up to you, Lily?”

“No, thank you,” she whispered.

He had come into the room testily, in a gloomy impatience; but she seemed so genuinely in pain and so pathetically fragile a contestant against her solid mother and against his own robust solidity that suddenly he lost every wish to chide her, even every wish to instruct her. He became weak with compassion, and the only wish left in him was the wish to make her happier. He sat down upon a painted little chair beside the bed.

“Lily, child,” he said, huskily, “for pity’s sake, what is it you want?”

And again the pathetic lips just moved.

“You know, Papa.”

There was something in the whispered word “Papa” that cried to him of sweetness under torture, and cried of it with so keen a sound that he groaned aloud. “O, baby girl!” he said, succumbing then and there, when he had least expected such a thing to happen to him. “We _can’t_ let you suffer like this! Don’t you know we’ll do anything on earth to make you happy?”

“No. You wouldn’t do the one thing—Papa?”

“I said anything,” he groaned.