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The smile now came hovering back, and alighted at a corner of Mrs. Alderling’s mouth, making it look, oddly enough, rather rueful. “It didn’t matter about me. I thought it a pity that Alderling’s talent should stop here.”

“Did you ever know anything like that?” he cried. “Perfectly willing to thrust me out into a cold other-world, and leave me to struggle on without her, when I had got used to her looking after me. Now I’m not so selfish as that. I shouldn’t want to have Marion living on through all eternity if I wasn’t with her. It would be too lonely for her.”

He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and she put her hand down over his shoulder into the hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that would have made me sick in some people. But in her the action was so casual, so absent, that it did not affect me disagreeably.

“Do you mean that you haven’t been away since you came here three years ago?” I asked.

“We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last winter, but it bored us to the limit.” Alderling poked his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as he spoke, having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. Alderling leaned back against the slim column again. He said gravely: “It was a great thing for Marion, though. In view of the railroad accident that didn’t happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition was that we should die together. Then, whether we found ourselves alive or not, we should be company for each other. She’s got it arranged with the thunderstorms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she never lets me go out on the water alone, for fear I shall watch my chance, and get drowned without her.”

I did not trouble myself to make out how much of this was mocking, and as there was no active participation in the joke expected of me, I kept on the safe side of laughing. “No wonder you’ve been able to do such a lot of pictures,” I said. “But I should have thought you might have found it dull–I mean dull together–at odd times.”

“Dull?” he shouted. “It’s stupendously dull! Especially when our country neighbors come in to ”liven us up.’ We’ve got neighbors here that can stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a week. We get tired of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting.”

“And you never,” I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible, “wear upon each other?”

“Horribly!” said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him. “We haven’t a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across the table, and I haven’t made a study of Marion–you must have noticed how many Marions there were that she hasn’t thrown at my head. Especially the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me.”

I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. “Does he keep it up all the time–this blague?”

“Pretty much,” she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke.

“But I didn’t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling,” I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her husband’s,–but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house.

“The housekeeping is enough,” she answered, with her tranquil smile.

There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. “Well,” I said, “I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your situation is most suggestive.”

“Oh, don’t mind us!” said Alderling.

“I won’t, thank you,” I answered. “Why, it’s equal to being cast away together on an uninhabited island.”