said Gladys, "you'd do nothing of the sort.
You'd compel him to make a dead set for you." And as she put down her
glass she gave his hair an affectionate pull--which was her way of
thanking him for saying what she most wished to hear on the subject she
most wished to hear about.

XIV.

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.

Gladys was now twenty-four and was even more anxious to marry than is
the average unmarried person. She had been eleven years a wanderer;
she was tired of it. She had no home; and she wanted a home.

Her aunt--her mother's widowed sister--had taken her abroad when she
was thirteen. John was able to defy or to deceive their mother. But
she could and did enforce upon Gladys the rigid rules which her
fanatical nature had evolved--a minute and crushing tyranny. Therefore
Gladys preferred any place to her home. For ten years she had been
roaming western Europe, nominally watched by her lazy, selfish, and
physically and mentally near-sighted aunt. Actually her only guardian
had been her own precocious, curiously prudent, curiously reckless
self. She had been free to do as she pleased; and she had pleased to do
very free indeed. She had learned all that her intense and catholic
curiosity craved to know, had learned it of masters of her own
selecting--the men and women who would naturally attract a lively young
person, eager to rejoice in an escape from slavery. Her eyes had
peered far into the human heart, farthest into the corrupted human
heart; yet, with her innocence she had not lost her honesty or her
preference for the things she had been brought up to think clean.

But she had at last wearied of a novelty which lay only in changes of
scene and of names, without any important change in characters or plot.
She began to be bored with the game of baffling the hopes inspired by
her beauty and encouraged by her seeming simplicity. And when her
mother came--as she said to Pauline, "The only bearable view of mother
is a distant view. I had forgot there were such people left on
earth--I had thought they'd all gone to their own kind of heaven." So
she fled to America, to her brother and his wife.

Dumont stayed eight days at the Eyrie on that trip, then went back to
his congenial life in New York--to his business and his dissipation.
He tempered his indulgence in both nowadays with some exercise--his
stomach, his heart, his nerves and his doctor had together given him a
bad fright. The evening bef