confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fair
to omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousness
of her openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, she
instituted and practised economies as alien to her nature as to her
husband's, and in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. She
was prudent; she was alert; and while presenting to the world all the
outward effect of a butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualities
of the bee.

With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner,
Mr. Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personal
things where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his own
comfort and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was she
who ordered their comings and goings, and decided in which hemisphere
they should sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, and
house, but always with the understanding that the kitchen and all the
domestic appointments were to her husband's mind. He was sensitive to
degrees of heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, and
he had a fine nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so much
with these details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer,
with her buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious little
woman. He had some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and was
expensively fond of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great deal
of time in packing and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome and
London and Paris; it had been one of his motives in consenting to come
home that he might get them out, and set up the various objects of
bronze and porcelain in cabinets. He had no vices, unless absolute
idleness ensuing uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitness
for business can be called a vice. Like other people who have always
been idle, he did not consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumed
himself upon it, for the man who has done nothing all his life naturally
looks down upon people who have done or are doing something. In Europe
he had not all the advantage of this superiority which such a man has
here; he was often thrown with other idle people, who had been useless
for so many generations that they had almost ceased to have any
consciousness of it. In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessness
had not that passive elegance which only ancestral uselessness can give;
that