Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/34

For the past few weeks his wife, Gertrude, had been struggling with her own intimate female problems. When the methods she had tried failed, she decided to take her husband into her confidence. Small and delicate in body, the thirty-year-old Gertrude still retained the soft glow of her blue eyes and the tender sheen of her chestnut-brown hair which, in its multi-form waves, had something about it to remind one of a forest in the glow of an autumn sunset.

Against his diminutive wife, Morris seemed gigantic, for all his little-above-average height, his rounded shoulders, and the awkward feet for which he had to have special shoes fitted. His face was long and his cheeks sunken. He had a big nose, the nostrils pinched, and his wide forehead arched into the darkness of his soft hair. What was most noticeable about him was the fullness of his lips; they seemed to glow with an interior redness. His thick eyebrows made a straight line across his forehead, and from beneath them gazed his rich brown eyes, dimmed over every once in a while as though their owner were lost in a dream.

He was an arresting sight when he sat reading, his face flushed and the strangely red lips appearing almost to glow. If he were interrupted he would start up, his eyes big and luminous and staring in an attempt to return to the reality of the world about him. He was a proletarian intellectual to whom books were not mere wine to sip, but mighty weapons to conquer the world. A book was a battlefield, and while reading he was like a general manipulating ideas like soldiers, directing their complicated maneuvers.

On the days when he wasn't working he had the habit of sitting on a chair by the window for long hours, never turning his head, and whistling. Even when the children tore about the house he seemed totally unaware of their antics. Sometimes Gertrude would be angry and upbraid him, and