I had been friendly enough since he came
to us. For all his cleverness--my husband said he had a keener brain
than any man he knew--I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I
am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of
ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what
I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about
it I said, 'His manners.' He surprised me very much by looking black at
that, and after a silence he said, 'Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman, that's
so'--not looking at me.

"Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I
found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected and hoped he
would do--fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my
disgust he had picked out the most worthless girl, I do believe, of all
those whom we used to meet. She was the daughter of wealthy parents, and
she did as she liked with them; very beautiful, well-educated, very good
at games--what they call a woman-athlete--and caring for nothing on
earth but her own amusement. She was one of the most unprincipled flirts
I ever knew, and quite the cleverest. Everyone knew it, and Mr. Marlowe
must have heard it; but she made a complete fool of him, brain and
all.... I don't know how she managed it, but I can imagine.... She liked
him, of course; but it was quite plain to me that she was playing with
him. The whole affair was so idiotic, I became perfectly furious. One
day I asked him to row me in a boat on the lake--all this happened at
our house by Lake George. We had never been alone together for any
length of time before. In the boat I talked to him. I was very kind
about it, I think, and he took it admirably, but he didn't believe me a
bit. He had the impudence to tell me that I misunderstood Alice's
nature. When I hinted at his prospects--I knew he had scarcely anything
of his own--he said that if she loved him he could make himself a
position in the world. I dare say that was true, with his abilities and
his friends; he is rather well-connected, you know, as well as popular.
But his enlightenment came very soon after that.

"My husband helped me out of the boat when we came back. He joked with
Mr. Marlowe about something, I remember; for through all that followed
he never once changed in his manner to him, and that was one reason why
I took so long to realize what he thought about him and myself. But to
me he was reserv