iline nose, a thin, firmly-set mouth, piercing
eyes and a magnificent carriage. She was no longer young when she had
accepted Mr. Lenox, and by what means she had encompassed his
subjugation we were never told: he always shook his head when he alluded
to his courtship. "A fellow is wax in a woman's hands," he had sometimes
remarked darkly. But after his marriage he had seemed to acquiesce in
his wife's belief in her high individual value to the world in general
and himself in particular, and had given her the best of everything.
Mrs. Lenox knew how to spend money, she had a house in New York and a
villa in Belfield; she had running accounts with tradesmen; and not only
gave dinner-parties, balls and receptions, but out-dressed her circle
with a sort of gorgeous superfluity which made her intimates experience
the ignominy of their inferiority. Mr. Lenox resigned himself to the
irresistible current of his wife's will, and if he felt inward doubts
silenced them as suggestions of morbid distrust in the discretion of a
woman whom he knew to be virtuous, and whose price was so much above
rubies that sordid calculations ought not to be mentioned in the same
breath with her. After a time, however, not even his high faith in the
necessity of agreeable issues where she was concerned could blind him to
the fact that he had many debts and but a few thousand dollars. He at
once invested these thousands in an enterprise which was shortly to make
all those interested in it millionaires. But if any one made money out
of it, it was not George Lenox, who suddenly found himself reduced to be
a pensioner upon his wife, who had twelve thousand dollars invested in
railway stock. They removed to their little Gothic cottage in Belfield,
and Mrs. Lenox lost what remained of her beauty, her spirits, her
temper, but never her ineradicable pride. Within a year her husband had
taken her railway stock, sold it and invested it in some speculation
which failed ignominiously, as any schemes of his were sure to do.
Nothing attracted him which was regulated by average laws of supply
answering a demand: all his undertakings required a miracle, an upheaval
of popular ideas, to ensure success. He never told his wife of this
embezzlement of his: when he lost her property he meditated suicide, and
merely staved off the evil day by pretending to pay her dividends
regularly; and for this he twice a year implored the assistance of his
uncle, Mr. Raymond. The railr