"Sometimes I think he positively avoids me," Clare wailed. "There's
the house, Elizabeth. Do you mind stopping a moment? He must be in his
office now. The light's burning."
"I wish you wouldn't, Clare. He'd hate it if he knew."
She moved on and Clare slowly followed her. The Rossiter girl's flow
of talk had suddenly stopped. She was thoughtful and impulsively
suspicious.
"Look here, Elizabeth, I believe you care for him yourself."
"I? What is the matter with you to-night, Clare?"
"I'm just thinking. Your voice was so queer."
They walked on in silence. The flow of Clare's confidences had ceased,
and her eyes were calculating and a trifle hard.
"There's a good bit of talk about him," she jerked out finally. "I
suppose you've heard it."
"What sort of talk?"
"Oh, gossip. You'll hear it. Everybody's talking about it. It's doing
him a lot of harm."
"I don't believe it," Elizabeth flared. "This town hasn't anything else
to do, and so it talks. It makes me sick."
She did not attempt to analyze the twisted motives that made Clare
belittle what she professed to love. And she did not ask what the gossip
was. Half way up Palmer Lane she turned in at the cement path between
borders of early perennials which led to the white Wheeler house. She
was flushed and angry, hating Clare for her unsolicited confidence and
her malice, hating even Haverly, that smiling, tree-shaded suburb which
"talked."
She opened the door quietly and went in. Micky, the Irish terrier, lay
asleep at the foot of the stairs, and her father's voice, reading aloud,
came pleasantly from the living room. Suddenly her sense of resentment
died. With the closing of the front door the peace of the house
enveloped her. What did it matter if, beyond that door, there were
unrequited love and petty gossip, and even tragedy? Not that she put all
that into conscious thought; she had merely a sensation of sanctuary
and peace. Here, within these four walls, were all that one should need,
love and security and quiet happiness. Walter Wheeler, pausing to turn a
page, heard her singing as she went up the stairs. In the moment of the
turning he too had a flash of content. Twenty-five years of married life
and all well; Nina married, Jim out of college, Elizabeth singing her
way up the stairs, and here by the lamp his wife quietly knitting while
he read to her. He was reading Paradise Lost: "The mind is its own
place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."