ailed to kiss Gloria when he came home. This evening he barely glanced
at her, and stood watching the dancing tongues of the wood fire, not
daring to think of the sound of his wife's voice. It came at last cool
and displeased.

"Are you ill?" she asked, looking steadily at him.

"No," he answered with an effort, and his outstretched hands shook
before the fire.

"Then what is the matter with you?"

"Nothing." He did not even turn his eyes to her, as he spoke the single
word.

A silence followed, during which he suffered. Nevertheless, the first
dreaded shock of hearing her voice was over. Though he had barely
glanced at her, he had known from her face what the sound of the voice
would be.

Gloria leaned back in her chair and watched the fire, and sighed. Griggs
had been with her in the afternoon, and she had been happy, quite
innocently, as she thought. The man's dominating strength and profound
earnestness, which would have been intolerably dull to many women,
smoothed Gloria, as it were. She said that he ironed the creases out of
her life for her. It was not a softening influence, but a calming one,
bred of strength pressing heavily on caprice. She resisted it, but took
pleasure in finding that it was irresistible. Now and then it was not
merely a steady pressure. He had a sledge hammer amongst his
intellectual weapons, and once in a while it fell upon one of her
illusions. She laughed at the destruction, and had no pity for the
fragments. They were not illusions integral with her vanity, for he
thought her perfect, and he would not have struck at her faults if he
had seen them. Her faults grew, for they had root in her vital nature,
and drew nourishment from his enduring strength, which surrounded them
and protected them in the blind, whole-heartedness of his love. For the
rest, he had kept his word. She had seen him turn white and bite his
lip, sometimes, and more than once he had left her abruptly, and had not
come back again for several days. But he had never forgotten his
promise, in any word or deed since he had given it.

It is a dangerous thing to pile up a mountain of massive reality from
which to look out upon the fading beauty of a fleeting illusion. In his
influence on Gloria's life, the strong man had overtopped the man of
genius by head and shoulders. And she loved the strange mixture of
attraction and repulsion she felt when she was with Griggs--the
something that wounded her vanity because she