oprietorship with which he followed her to the table he had reserved
in the fashionable restaurant of the Hotel Strathmore. He missed none of
the interested looks directed at her as she passed, and glowed with
satisfaction.

"If they notice her like this in a city," he thought triumphantly,
"she'll make 'em sit up in Bartlesville!" Sprudell's cup of happiness
seemed running full.

"You're looking great to-night," he whispered as they sat down.

"Fine feathers--" she smiled slightly--"my one good gown."

"My dear, you can have a hundred--a thousand!" he cried extravagantly.
"It's up to you!"

She studied him curiously, wondering what had happened. He was tremulous
with suppressed excitement; his high spirits were like the elation of
intoxication and he ordered with a lavishness which made him
conspicuous.

But Sprudell was indifferent to appearances, seeming to survey the world
at large from the height of omnipotence and it seemed to Helen that
every objectionable trait he had was exaggerated, twice enlarged under
the stimulus of this mysterious, exalted mood. His egotism loomed
colossal, he was oblivious to everything and everybody but himself, else
he could not have failed to see the growing coldness in her eyes.

Helen herself had little appetite, so while Sprudell partook of the
numerous dishes with relish she inspected him anew from the critical
viewpoint of the woman who intends to marry without love. As she
dissected him it occurred to her that Sprudell exemplified every petty
feminine prejudice she had. She disliked his small, red mouth, which had
a way of fixing itself in an expression of mawkish sentimentality when
he looked at her, and there was that in the amorous, significant light
in his infantile blue eyes which sickened her very soul. She
disapproved of his toddling walk, his fat, stooped shoulders, his spats
and general appearance of over-emphasized dapperness. The excessive
politeness, the elaborate deference which he showed her upon occasions,
exasperated her, and it was incredible, she thought, that a part in a
man's back hair should be able to arouse such violence of feeling. But
it did. She hated it. She loathed it. It was one of her very strongest
aversions. She had always hoped never even to know a man who parted his
back hair and now she was going to marry one.

She tried to imagine herself going through life making a pretense of
taking his learning and his talents seriously, of refraini