stomed business suit; its neat creases and quiet colour made
him again the responsible, unromantic lawyer I had known, and took
away the last vestige of dramatic oddity from the situation. It all
seemed natural and sober enough.

"Had you thought of taking her to your mother and marrying her there,
Roger?" Tip went on quietly. "Supposing she were to adopt her,
even--you could arrange all that easily--then there would be no
awkwardness. As it is, it might be made a little uncomfortable ... it
isn't as if you were a nobody, you know, old man, and you don't know
her name, you see, and ..."

I will own that this struck me as an extremely practical plan for a
moment, and I looked hopefully at Roger. But he shook his head.

"I see what you mean, Tip," said he, "but it's impossible. I wish it
weren't. I thought of it, of course. But there are reasons why it
won't do. I won't attempt to deny that this will be a blow to my
mother. I know her too well to consider for a moment the possibility
of her helping me in this way. She--she is very proud and--and she has
her own ideas.... My cousin, too--Oh, Lord!" he concluded suddenly,
"Jerry'll tell you it wouldn't work."

Of course it wouldn't. In one flash I saw that dark, determined house
on the Back Bay, Madam Bradley's cold, bloodless face and Sarah's
malicious eyes probing, probing Margarita's crystal unconsciousness.
It seemed to me suddenly that Roger's mother might not, and that Sarah
certainly would not, forgive this business. I saw his mother in a
series of retrospective flashes, as I had been seeing her for
twenty-five years: each time a little more impersonal, a little more
withdrawn, a little less tolerant. I remembered the quiet, bitter
quarrel with the president of the university to which he would
naturally have gone, and its result of sending him to Yale, the first
of his name to desert Harvard, to the amazement and horror of his
kinsfolk. I remembered the cold resentment that followed his decision
to go to work in New York, based very sensibly, I thought, on the
impossibility of submission to his uncle's great firm--the head of the
family--and the inadvisability of working in Boston under his
disfavour. I remembered the banishment of his younger sister on her
displeasing marriage (the old lady actually read her out of the family
with bell and book) and the poor woman's subsequent social death and
bitter decline of health and spirit. I remembered the sad death of hi