FIDELIA wrote in her diary, upon the second morning after their return to Chicago:
"We've been married eleven days and nothing wrong has happened. Nothing at all! David just gets more and more wonderful with me every day. There's nothing like having character in a man you're married to; it counts in so many ways. It makes a man think about the girl . . . but it keeps him thinking about other people, too.
"Now S" [invariably Fidelia referred to "S" by initial only in this volume of her diary; but she always wrote David's name] "was about as different as a man could be. He didn't think about me. He didn't! Of course, if he wasn't thinking about me, then he wasn't thinking about any other girl, either. He was just having his way. David's fine to me. He keeps me right in his mind.
"He keeps Alice, too. He doesn't want her instead of me; Maybe he might, if I was afraid he might and if I didn't mention her and want him to. . . . I want him to see her, too.
"I like his thinking about her. I do. I like his thinking about his father and mother. He hasn't seen Alice or heard from her in any way; but his father and mother both wrote him yesterday; I mean, he got the letter yesterday at his office. It had been waiting for him about a week. I've seen the envelope; he wouldn't show me what his father said nor all his mother said.
"I don't think she said what she wanted to, quite; for her letter came enclosed with his; but she said "Bring my new daughter to me, my son, so I may love her."
"Mother Herrick is sweet. I know I'll love her and she will truly try to like me. I guess it is pretty sure that father Herrick won't. We are going to Itanaca this afternoon."
Fidelia was writing in a room at the Blackstone Hotel. She had a beautiful and luxurious room and she liked the comfort of it after their camp; but it did not particularly impress her. She was used to stopping at very good hotels when she visited cities and she had little idea of the mental struggle it had cost David to decide upon the extravagance of this room.
To her, the decision depended chiefly upon whether they could afford it; and David had assured her that he could and he was particularly positive after he had visited his office and talked with Snelgrove; for he discovered that during his absence the factory had continued delivery of cars and the model was proving a "catchy" and popular one. Customers were coming in and buying.
Fidelia had in her dresser drawer five ten-dollar bills which her husband had given her, for her personal use, and which were a sort of trophy taken from his commissions which had been accumulating for him. She did not need the money and she had no idea of spending it but she liked his giving it to her. She had a hundred dollars of her own, which she had carried to camp, and now she went out to buy gifts for David's family.
She walked up Michigan Avenue debating with herself what she could bring. She could not give clothes, at least not necessary clothing such as she had helped David select in the spring; yet she must give some expensive things to show how much she wanted to please them.
Stopping before a shop window, she remembered that David had told her his mother had liked that colorful dress which Fidelia, herself, had selected, so she picked out a gay, green parasol to go with it. She gazed in a silversmith's window upon shining vases, platters, teapots and table-ware which tempted her; but she passed on to a florist's. Flowers never gave offense, she considered, so she purchased a huge box of roses which the florist promised to pack so as to endure a four-hour railroad journey and to deliver at the hotel just before her time of leaving. Fidelia hesitated at the door of a shop showing laces and scarfs and stockings but she went on to a confectioner's where she bought five pounds of the most expensive chocolates and had them sent in an extravagant basket, lined with satin, and to be used, when emptied, for a lady's sewing.
Fidelia succeeded in spending almost sixty dollars for these and she was glad of it. She had forty more to spend upon a gift for David's father and she went out again to the sunlight of the warm, summer morning and wandered along the boulevard looking for something which would prove she wished to please him.
Nearly every one who passed—and particularly the men—gazed at her; and Fidelia got to thinking about them. Here on the boulevard where faced the clubs and the fashionable shops, no man gave in his glance anything but approval of Fidelia Herrick. No man she offended; no man but would try to please her sparing her any need of thought to please him except with herself. But Fidelia knew that, though none might pass her this morning on Michigan Avenue, there were men more implacable than any woman could be in regard to her; there were men whom never could she please, no matter what she did, but to whom, however hard she tried otherwise, she only added offense; and she realized, as she wandered along with her forty dollars, how worse than useless would be a gift if David's father proved to be one of these men.
David met her in their room at noon and when she showed him what she had bought for his mother and sisters, he kissed her and told her that her gifts were just "like her." And how like her they were! How little knowledge they showed of the home to which he was taking her; how little knowledge his wife had, indeed, of himself.
There was an incident at the railroad station, tremendous to David, and which Fidelia did not even suspect. It was his purchase of parlor-car tickets to Itanaca. David had bought Pullman tickets twice previously; but both times under conditions so strange as to call up no comparisons; for the occasions were when he was leaving Streator at noon with his bride and when he and she were returning from their camp to Chicago. But now he was going home on a familiar train made up of half a dozen ordinary day-coaches, in which David Herrick always had traveled, and a parlor car in the rear which he had never entered.
None of his family had ever entered it. Not his father nor his mother nor had his sister Deborah upon her one journey to Chicago. Of course it had been possible for any of them to spend an extra dollar for a seat in a parlor car; but no one of them had thought of doing it. What a contempt had David Herrick for people who paid to put themselves apart from others or who cared so much for the comfort of a cotton cover over plush that they spent extra fare for it! Yet, here was David Herrick escorting his wife aboard the parlor car for Itanaca.
It did no good for him to argue with himself that, considering what he was making, he "ought" to take a parlor car; his own feelings answered him, as he sat in his separate seat with its clean, white cover over the plush, with the window beside him screened against dust, with an electric fan whirling noiselessly above him—and in the next seat a girl so beautiful that every one gazed at her in admiration and who was his wife. He was a different person from the boy who used to travel, to and from college, in those hot, grimy, common coaches ahead.
The train, leaving the city and the region of the lake, passed into the country, into the familiar, flat, cloudless cornland of central Illinois. Over the fields, black and brown and gray and all studded with the bright green leaves and stalks of the growing corn, lay a glaring, heavy heat. No breeze stirred the solidity of it. Motorcars cut it, cleaving in straight lines on the level, yellow roads and the dust, raised by their wheels, remained suspended in long streaks which showed the substance of that hot sunlight; the cars which stood at the crossing, waiting for the train to go by, were halted under hanging, powdery halos of haze.
It was a day when men worked in sweat and swift weariness. David Herrick well knew the burden of labor on such a day. How he used to work himself, unsparingly, brutally because of the belief bred in him, that labor and hardship for their own sake were good for his soul!
This heat, slapping in through his screened window, struck his cheek with a challenge which the ceaselessly whirling fan could not cool; it inquired of David Herrick how much of principle had been involved in his denials of self-indulgence, how much they had been merely a result of necessity.
Here in the heat and the glare, he suddenly thought, oppositely, of night darkness and cold; he thought how, with Alice in her car stopped at the edge of the graveyard, he had declared he would cease to sacrifice his opportunities for pleasure on this earth for the sake of laying up uncertain treasures in heaven.
The graveyard that night and the snow and the dark and the storm over the lake had not reproached him as now did this afternoon glare and heat over his homeland.
Fidelia took off her hat; the porter brought a paper bag to protect it and put it upon the rack overhead. David pulled lower the heavy green window-curtain, as the sun got around to the side of the car; and Fidelia leaned back her head comfortably and dozed. Now and then, as an air current or a lurch of the car puffed in the curtain, a streak of sun shone on her hair and made it glorious; and David, watching her, felt his throat close and choke. How lovely she was and how sweet and docile, always! How she wanted to be liked! And how little idea she had of the home, his home, to which he was taking her!
He gazed from her to her presents piled on the floor beyond her seat. It was not yet too late to prevent her from offering them; he had still time to explain that it would be far, far better for her to come to his father's home empty-handed, in poor clothes and plain in appearance. Then his father would know that David had married his wife out of no lust of the flesh.
David swung about, denying such a notion. They would see her as she was and bearing the gifts for them which she, herself, had selected.