The Family
He took up one of her gloves and began drawing it
out through his fingers. She said nothing, but he
saw her lip quiver, and she turned away and began
looking at the house through the glasses. He likewise began to examine the audience. He wished
he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been
mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark
forest, always, no matter how close it has been to
one’s own. Presently the melting music of the
tenor’s last aria brought their eyes together in a
smile not altogether sad.
That night, after he was in bed, among unaccustomed surroundings and a little wakeful, St. Peter still played with his idea of a picturesque shipwreck, and he cast about for the particular occasion he would have chosen for such a finale. Before he went to sleep he found the very day, but his wife was not in it. Indeed, nobody was in it but himself, and a weather-dried little sea captain from the Hautes-Pyrenees, half a dozen spry seamen, and a line of gleaming snow peaks, agonizingly high and sharp, along the southern coast of Spain.
Louie arranged the birthday dinner in the public dining-room of the hotel, and three of the Professor’s colleagues dined with them on that occasion. Louie had gone out to the university to hear St. Peter lecture, had met some of the faculty, and immediately invited them to dinner. They ac-
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