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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

OCTOBER, 1929

THE TRADER'S WIFE

BY JEAN KENYON MACKENZIE

I
HARFORD watched his wife pack her clothes. It was a strange thing, he thought, that he could not modify her industry. All her savings, the fruit of that life of drudgery from which their marriage had withdrawn her, were transmuted into furbelows that were tossed about the room. An open box received her bodice of green velvet, a lemon-colored dolman with fringe, a padded jacket - he fidgeted and gazed moodily at the padded jacket, remembering the West Coast. He sighed with a memory too heavy of its heavy air. He wished he could prepare his wife for Africa; he roused himself to try again, but she walked away from him into the dimmer end of the long room, to tauten the square end of her Paisley shawl, one end of which he found himself, incredibly, to be holding. Her white arms were busy with the many-colored fabric, folding it with large gestures, intent on bringing it into small compass. She had no inner ear for his warning. 

'I understand, Mr. Harford, it will be warm. But a lady must maintain her common state; those about her must be done the honor of an effort to please.' 

'Those about her!' said Harford.
'Who and where are they? I tell you, Lucy, there are not to be five white men in ten days' journey- no, nor in a month of journeying.' But he checked himself; he was not a man to persist in futile effort, and his wife's eyes, wide at gaze, were empty of apprehension. She would dress, she said, for the five.

He suddenly wished that she were a sea captain's daughter- there were many of these in the town of Newport. Surely a captain's daughter would entertain some faint misgiving as to the isolations and miseries of the wilderness. And might - the idea visited him - be induced to stay at home. And would be, perhaps, likely enough, less romantic. He sighed. His animosities toward her passionate vanities died down, and in the ebb of these there emerged a fundamental misgiving of the circumstance. How came he to have married her? Not for her beauty - though she was good-looking, he thought, dwelling on her now in her vivid animations, white-armed among the velvets and silks of her novel and cherished wardrobe. A fine figure of a woman, pressing out into her future like a ship's head, the figurehead on the Abundance, that ship on which he had last served his country - like that, with her skirts surging behind

Copyright 1929, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.