rtled recoil having passed, Sophy watched
his amazingly graceful poses with a tolerable pleasure. She could not
really enjoy it--that her husband should prance about so attired for the
amusement of their guests--but she remembered, soberly enough, that he
was very young, and that her distaste was probably the result of maturer
years.

Then came the real shock. The dance grew frankly ludicrous. With
dextrous sleight of hand, Alcibiades made it appear as though his
"quail" were angrily demanding a drink from the inverted goblet. The
fowl finally conquers. The goblet is filled for him again and again.
Alcibiades can no longer resist temptation, thus seeing a mere fowl take
its fill. He, too, begins to drink.... The dance ends in a mad, drunken
whirl, in which Alcibiades crowns the pheasant with his wreath, and they
collapse together upon the floor in a maudlin heap.

The thing was really wonderfully well done. The guests were in ecstasies
of laughter. But Sophy felt cold and sick. It seemed to her that he
could not love her as she had thought. Else how could he turn the body
that she loved into a travesty for others to laugh at? She felt as
though the dignity of their mutual love were lying there on the floor,
sprawled and ruffled and lifeless like the stuffed pheasant....

This feeling was not apparent in her face. Her training had been too
thorough and bitter for her to let the world have even a glimpse of her
chagrin. But though no one else guessed it, Loring was aware instantly
of something wrong. As soon as he had changed back to ordinary dress,
and returned to the drawing-room, where people were now saying
good-night--he felt this. And he, too, was chagrined. He had taken just
enough liquor to make this chagrin of his savour of anger. For the first
time he felt her "superiority" not as that of a goddess, but of a wife.
She "disapproved" of him. To be "disapproved" of had always roused the
ugly side of his nature.

"And she told me herself to go ahead," he thought irefully. "Now she's
got it in for me.... I'll be curtain-lectured I suppose--get a glimpse
of the seamy side of matrimony...."

He reinforced himself with another high-ball.

When the last guest had gone he went up to Sophy. She had turned to get
her fan from a sofa where she had left it. It was the fan of white
peacock feathers that Amaldi had once admired. She thought of him
suddenly as she took it in her hand. How would he have looked had he
seen