lly indifferent to
clothes, and Howard's well-fitting check suit had the magic touch of the
metropolis. His manner matched his garments. Obsequious porters grasped
his pig-skin bag, and seized Honora's; the man at the gate inclined his
head as he examined their tickets, and the Pullman conductor himself
showed them their stateroom, and plainly regarded them as important
people far from home. Howard had the cosmopolitan air. He gave the man
a dollar, and remarked that the New Orleans train was not exactly the
Chicago and New York Limited.

"Not by a long shot," agreed the conductor, as he went out, softly
closing the door behind him.

Whereupon the cosmopolitan air dropped from Mr. Howard Spence, not
gracefully, and he became once more that superfluous and awkward and
utterly banal individual, the husband.

"Let's go out and walk on the platform until the train starts,"
suggested Honora, desperately. "Oh, Howard, the shades are up! I'm sure
I saw some one looking in!"

He laughed. But there was a light in his eyes that frightened her, and
she deemed his laughter out of place. Was he, after all, an utterly
different man than what she had thought him? Still laughing, he held to
her wrist with one hand, and with the other pulled down the shades.

"This is good enough for me," he said. "At last--at last," he whispered,
"all the red tape is over, and I've got you to myself! Do you love me
just a little, Honora?"

"Of course I do," she faltered, still struggling, her face burning as
from a fire.

"Then what's the matter?" he demanded.

"I don't know--I want air. Howard, please let me go. It's-it's so hot
inhere. You must let me go."

Her release, she felt afterwards, was due less to a physical than a
mental effort. She seemed suddenly to have cowed him, and his resistance
became enfeebled. She broke from him, and opened the door, and reached
the cement platform and the cold air. When he joined her, there was
something jokingly apologetic about his manner, and he was smoking a
cigarette; and she could not help thinking that she would have respected
him more if he had held her.

"Women beat me," he said. "They're the most erratic stock in the
market."

It is worthy of remark how soon the human, and especially the feminine
brain adjusts itself to new conditions. In a day or two life became real
again, or rather romantic.

For the American husband in his proper place is an auxiliary who makes
all things possible.