Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1914 — HIS WOMANLY WIFE [ARTICLE]

HIS WOMANLY WIFE

By ELIZABETH SEARS.

Dorothy Marshall sank back in the big, cushioned, bamboo chair before her driftwood fire with a sigh of content She held a package of business papers in her hands. Dorothy always dreaded business details. It would be a Teal relief when Thurston , should take it all oft her hands. Meantime — theflre snapped—-and the-embera-glowed seductively. She was tired.' Positively worn out Thurston had upset her so that afternoon. He had been so impetuous and she was not used to scenes. She dropped the papers in her lap and clasped her hands behind her head. She loved the fragrant smell of burning wood. She loved to watch the dancing, brilliant flames that nothing but driftwood could produce. She held out her dainty toes to the heat and lazily congratulated herself, as she admired them, that she had never adopted the mannish styles either of dress or of manners that so many women did. Tom had never approved of it Her clinging black dress hung in essentially feminine and well-built lines as she sat there; but it was not at all becoming. She did not look well in black, yet she had worn it faithfully, even devotedly, ever since Tom’s death. Her mothe r had spoken her mind plainly abouiAt. “You look like a fright black,” she had said, with the brutal frankness which is permissible to relatives. “Tom himself would not wish it if he knew how unbecoming it was.” was.” Thurston.had said almost the same thing that afternoon when he had asked her to marry him in a month and go with him to Japan. "Tom himself would wish you to be happy,” he had urged. She loved Thurston with every fiber of her being, but be was a man and could not understand her feelings about it. Tom would wish her to be happy. That was Just It. If he had been a brute or anything of that sort, it would be different. He had been more than good to her, always. She remembered, with a choke in her throat, all his affectionate little ways. >

Thurston was not always quite reasonable. He had shown more than a trace of a horrid temper. He had been unnecessarily severe when he had denounced her reasons for delay as absurd, quixotic, unreasonable. Surely it was not unreasonable to wieh to show proper respect to o'ne’s husband.) Thurston, too, had reminded her of the fact that she had been a widow more than tl year; that she had mourned her husband faithfully and with sinters grief. felt a thrill of conscious virtue at the thought. Not many women" would have wcft-n black bo constantly and so long when it was so unbecoming. She had really been very fond of Jom. Not, of course, as she loved Thurston; no one could expect it. They were eo different. She could not help but love Tom. He had been so good to her. He had loved her so completely. “I had his every thought,” she murmured. She the day he had brought her home the very chair she sat in, especially for her comfort. And even when he had gone to Japan that time he had been so worried about leaving her. She had wanted to go. She had always longed to see Japan, but Tom had been so tied down with that tiresome business he had thought the trip might not be pleasant for her. But he had promised to go again Just to take her, the dear boy. The Grantleys had gone in the same steamer. Mrs. Grantley had told her how worried and busy poor Tom had been. If she had known the Grantleys were going at that time she would have gone too. She would have enjoyed the trip with them even if Tom had been too busy and occupied to take her about. Dear Tom. He had never encouraged her intimacy with Helen Grantley. She was not his style of woman, though she was undeniably handsome and brilliant in a Cleopatra sort of way. She was eo popular with most men. But Tom could never bear any woman who made herself noticeable in any way. "No woman ever suited him so well as his brown-eyed, womanly wife.” How often he had said that. Tom had never dropped his loving ways. True, they had been married but two years, but she had known men who had been positively coarae ta their wives in far less time than that It was so odd that Thurston would not understand the way she felt It would be so mean, so disloyal to poor Tom to fjprget him so soon. No —not to forget him, exactly; she would never do tha^—but to live and be happy and be loved while he — no, decidedly, Thurston must wait Men wen so selfish, the best of them. "If you love me.” Thurston had said, “do not allow a mistaken impulse of conscience to keep us apart" Conscience! It was but a simple act of justice to the dead. Tom would have been Inconsolable if it had been ' she who had died. He had-So often told her she had filled his life so completely. How. angry Thurston had looked when she had refused to marry him so soon. Still she had never admired him quite so much as when he had gone away with that black frown on his handsome face. He had slammed the door, too. One only shun a door as » last resort. \ •

Hos fortunate she was to be loved by two good men. It was so puzzling to know just how to decide. Of course if Thurston insieted she might shorteif the waiting six months— A cinder snapped and flew out on her knee. She roused herself to a realizing sense of her surroundings. She Bhivered and she listened to the muffled fall of thr. snow against the window and seemed suddenly cold. A mysterious, hardly defined sense as of some overwhelming emotion, exhilarating and yet depressing, surged through her. She halt rose as the feeling became stronger, more tense. She seemed waiting—waiting for a decisive blow, to fall. Tom—Thurston--Japan, All were revolving through her and about her in a raging pood of sensation. The papers dropped from her nerveless handß. S' ' “I have been half asleep* mooning over the fire,’’ she said, nervously, rising and trying to shake off the strange influence that possessed her. ’“I am all unstrung. I will not look at these papers tonight.” i She crossed the room to her desk. It was Tom’s desk, and she loved to use it because of that. She drew out a drawer in it sharply. It was one she seldom used. A little bundle dropped from a recess behind it “My picture,” she said, wonderingly, as she bent to take it out. “Dear Tom, he always kept my pictures and my letters.” Her eyes glowed with tender tears. “If I loved Thurston twice as much I would still bear your name a little longer, dear, after this,” she murmured, softly, holding the bundle to her cheek. A “moment later she stood as if carved from pulsating wax. She had seen the face in the picture. It was not her face, Staring boldly back into her startled eyes was the laughing face of Helen Grant! ey. She opened the letters. Ah! what theyTe* vealed. A surging wave of fierce, uncontrolled anger swayed through her. It was the anger which comes to a woman when she first learns that she has been deceived where she has loved and trusted- She crushed and bent the smiling lips In the picture as her clenched hand boat impotently at the empty air. The flames in the dying fire flashed up once, twice, as they greedily wrapped about the food she flung them. She looked at ' the calendar on the desk and made a rapid calculation. Then she wrote a note. “But not to Japan,” Bhe thought, bitterly, as she sealed and addressed it. “Never there.” (Copyright, by Daily Story Pub. Co.)