She was a good woman, and she wanted her children's happiness more than
anything in the world, but she had a faint and sternly repressed
feeling of relief when Nina announced her engagement. Nina did it with
characteristic sangfroid, at dinner one night.
"Don't ring for Annie for a minute, mother," she said. "I want to tell
you all something. I'm going to marry Leslie Ward."
There had been a momentary pause. Then her father said: "Just a minute. Is that Will Ward's boy?"
"Yes. He's not a boy."
"Well, he'll come around to see me before there's any engagement. Has
that occurred to either of you?"
"Oh, he'll be around. He'd have come to-night, but Howard Moore is
having his bachelor dinner. I hope he doesn't look shot to pieces
to-morrow. These bachelor things--! We'd better have a dinner or
something, mother, and announce it."
There had been the dinner, with a silver loving cup bought for the
occasion, and thereafter to sit out its useless days on the Sheraton
sideboard. And there had been a trousseau and a wedding so expensive
that a small frown of anxiety had developed between Walter Wheeler's
eyebrows and stayed there.
For Nina's passion for things was inherent, persisting after her
marriage. She discounted her birthday and Christmases in advance, coming
around to his office a couple of months before the winter holidays and
needing something badly.
"It's like this, daddy," she would say. "You're going to give me a check
for Christmas anyhow, aren't you? And it would do me more good now. I
simply can't go to another ball."
"Where's your trousseau?"
"It's worn out-danced to rags. And out of date, too."
"I don't understand it, Nina. You and Leslie have a good income. Your
mother and I--"
"You didn't have any social demands. And wedding presents! If one more
friend of mine is married--"
He would get out his checkbook and write a check slowly and
thoughtfully. And tearing it off would say: "Now remember, Nina, this is for Christmas. Don't feel aggrieved when
the time comes and you have no gift from us."
But he knew that when the time came Margaret, his wife, would hold out
almost to the end, and then slip into a jeweler's and buy Nina something
she simply couldn't do without.
It wasn't quite fair, he felt. It wasn't fair to Jim or to Elizabeth.
Particularly to Elizabeth.
Sometimes he looked at Elizabeth with a little prayer in his heart,
never articulate, that life would be good to her; that she might keep
her illusions and her dreams; that the soundness and wholesomeness of
her might keep her from unhappiness. Sometimes, as she sat reading or
sewing, with the light behind her shining through her soft hair, he saw
in her a purity that was almost radiant.