his wife.
Mrs. Renfield was the widow of one of the diplomatists who languish in
perpetual first secretary-ship at our various embassies. Her life had
given her ease without triviality, and a sense of the importance of
politics seldom found in ladies of her nationality. She regarded a
public life as the noblest and most engrossing of careers, and combined
with great social versatility an equal gift for reading blue-books and
studying debates. So sincere was the latter taste that she passed
without regret from the amenities of a European life well stocked with
picturesque intimacies to the rawness of the Midsylvanian capital. She
helped Mornway in his fight for the Governorship as a man likes to be
helped by a woman--by her tact, her good looks, her memory for faces,
her knack of saying the right thing to the right person, and her
capacity for obscure hard work in the background of his public
activity. But, above all, she helped him by making his private life
smooth and harmonious. For a man careless of personal ease, Mornway was
singularly alive to the domestic amenities. Attentive service,
well-ordered dinners, brightly burning fires, and a scent of flowers in
the house--these material details, which had come to seem the extension
of his wife's personality, the inevitable result of her nearness, were
as agreeable to him after five years of marriage as in the first
surprise of his introduction to them. Mrs. Nimick had kept house
jerkily and vociferously; Ella performed the same task silently and
imperceptibly, and the results were all in favor of the latter method.
Though neither the Governor nor his wife had large means, the
household, under Mrs. Mornway's guidance, took on an air of sober
luxury as agreeable to her husband as it was exasperating to her
sister-in-law. The domestic machinery ran without a jar. There were no
upheavals, no debts, no squalid cookless hiatuses between intervals of
showy hospitality; the household moved along on lines of quiet elegance
and comfort, behind which only the eye of the housekeeping sex could
have detected a gradually increasing scale of expense.

Such an eye was now projected on the Governor's surroundings, and its
explorations were summed up in the tone in which Mrs. Nimick repeated
from the threshold: "I always say I don't see how she does it!"

The tone did not escape the Governor, but it disturbed him no more than
the buzz of a baffled insect. Poor Grace! It was not his fau