"I've got to go down to the country," she said, "and I may stay the night. Tell Miss Marquand to open everything and act as if she were me."
"No one could do that," said the loyal Jan.
"Well, as nearly as possible then," said Ben. "This is my address if you want anything special," and she hurried off.
At the station she sent a telegram to Merrill to announce her imminence, and then she settled down in the compartment to consider the situation.
Poor old Egbert, she thought. What an arid life! To a large extent wasted, with the kind of waste that is going on on all sides. What did he marry for? He thought he was in love, or, at any rate, in need of Merrill. But he wasn't. He no sooner acquired her than he forgot her; she became furniture; all he wanted was himself and the opportunity to get on with his foolish book, which didn't matter to anyone. Everything was sacrificed to that; his blood turned to ink; he ceased to be interested in actual present-day life; his sympathy changed to a pedantic curiosity; he gave what was meant for his fellow-creatures to a Biblical tribe that had been dead for thousands of years.
And how many other men were like him? They didn't all write about the Hittites, but they had their absorbing Hittites all the same, whether business Hittites or play Hittites, and so their altar promises became scraps of paper and the precious hours slipped away. What a muddle! What a muddle!
And Merrill? Fortunately she was of a more equable nature than so many a neglected wife; fortunately she had no great depths, or, at any rate, if she had, no man had discovered them. Egbert had been lucky in his choice. Many another woman would have taken things into her own hands and have secretly saved something from the wreck. But Merrill was too light-hearted, too simple. And now perhaps she would marry again--she was only a little over thirty--and be happy: marry a plus-four man, with a taste for dancing and the theatre, who, if he ever thought of the Hittites at all, thought of them as a Central African race who made bearers for hunters of big game.
That was Merrill's right husband, and they would have a large house in the country, and two or three children, and come to town for the season, and if he did any work at all it would be purely as a J.P.