oks. The woman
herself was hateful. How, she wondered, could Loftus drive about with
her when, with herself, he would barely be seen.

And why wouldn't he? In those days Marie's whys were many. But at the
end of every one of them the answer which she always found was that it
was all because she was not his wife. Yet there always another why
recurred. Why was she not what he had sworn she should be?

The possible disinheritance which hitherto he had imaginatively
displayed had no terrors of any kind for her. On bread and kisses she
would have lived with him joyfully in a slum. To luxury she was
unused. That with which she was surrounded she would not have missed
in the least. On the contrary, it had grown odious to her; it
suggested a form of compensation the very thought of which was
sickening. It was not for this that she had left Gay street, but for
him and an honest name.

In the prolonged absence of the latter there were times when her soul
seemed to slink into the obscurities of her being and swoon there for
shame. There were times when she could not look at herself in the
glass. Quite as often she had found it difficult to look at her
servants.

After the episode in Central Park the increasing sense of degradation
affected her so deeply that with a weary idea of preserving such
self-respect as she might, summoning those servants she dismissed
them--securing, meanwhile, from an agency a woman able to do what
little was essential, a negress named Blanche who talked Irish.

When Loftus discovered what she had done he was for having the
servants immediately back. He liked to have the girl entertain for
him. He liked to have his friends come to the aviary and hear the bird
sing. But Marie, with an air of determination that was new to him,
refused.

"They do not respect me," she said. "I don't blame them for that. Nor
can you. When we are married it will be different.

"When we are," she added with slow scorn.

CHAPTER II

THE MOTE IN THE EYE

A philosopher has noted that at certain periods a great many stupid
people have a good deal of stupid money. This condition, describable
as plethora, is succeeded by another catalogued as panic.

The number of stupid people who at this time stalked the streets
unchecked was phenomenal. Among them was Annandale. It was not a
beggarly twenty-five thousand a year that he had, but fifty, with, in
addition, more to come. This, though measurably satisfactory, was