ing presently, she walked down Fifth Avenue as far as Twenty-third
Street, and then, confused by the crossing, she passed into Broadway,
without knowing that it was Broadway, until she was enlightened by a
stranger to whom she appealed. When she began to retrace her steps, she
discovered that she was hungry, and she longed to go into one of the
places where she saw people eating at little tables; but her terror of
what she had heard of the high prices of food in New York restaurants
restrained her. General Goode still told of paying six dollars and a
half for a dinner he had ordered in a hotel in Fifth Avenue, and her
temperamental frugality, reinforced by anxiety as to Oliver's debts,
preferred to take no unnecessary risks with the small amount in her
pocket book. Oliver, of course, would have laughed at her petty
economies, and have ordered recklessly whatever attracted his appetite;
but, as she gently reminded herself again, men were different. On the
whole, this lordly prodigality pleased her rather than otherwise. She
felt that it was in keeping with the bigness and the virility of the
masculine ideal; and if there were pinching and scraping to be done, she
immeasurably preferred that it should fall to her lot to do it and not
to Oliver's.

At the hotel she found that Oliver had not come in, and after a belated
luncheon of tea and toast in the dining-room, she went upstairs and sat
down to watch for his return between the Nottingham lace curtains at the
window. From the terrific height, on which she felt like a sparrow, she
could see a row of miniature puppets passing back and forth at the
corner of Fifth Avenue. For hours she tried in vain to distinguish the
figure of Oliver in the swiftly moving throng, and in spite of herself
she could not repress a feeling of pleasant excitement. She knew that
Oliver would think that she ought to be depressed by his failure, yet
she could not prevent the return of a child-like confidence in the
profound goodness of life. Everything would be right, everything was
eternally bound to be right from the beginning. That inherited casuistry
of temperament, which had confused the pleasant with the true for
generations, had become in her less a moral conviction than a fixed
quality of soul. To dwell even for a minute on "the dark side of things"
awoke in her the same instinct of mortal sin that she had felt at the
discovery that Oliver was accustomed to "break" the Sabbath by reading
pr