pay for it. He saw the two enter a quick-lunch
restaurant--struggled with a crack-brained impulse to join them--dragged
himself away to his appointment.

He was never too amiable in dealing with his clients, because he had
found that, in self-protection, to avoid being misunderstood and largely
increasing the difficulties of amicable intercourse, he must keep the
feel of iron very near the surface. That day he was for the first time
irascible. If the business his clients were engaged in had been less
perilous and his acute intelligence not indispensable, he would have
cost the firm dear. But in business circles, where every consideration
yields to that of material gain, the man with the brain may conduct
himself as he pleases--and usually does so, when he has strength of
character.

All afternoon he wrestled with himself to keep away from the office. He
won, but it was the sort of victory that gives the winner the chagrin
and despondency of defeat. At home, late in the afternoon, he found
Josephine in the doorway, just leaving. "You'll walk home with me--won't
you?" she said. And, taken unawares and intimidated by guilt, he could
think of no excuse.

Some one--probably a Frenchman--has said that there are always in a
man's life three women--the one on the way out, the one that is, and the
one that is to be. Norman--ever the industrious trafficker with the
feminine that the man of the intense vitality necessary to a great
career of action is apt to be--was by no means new to the situation in
which he now found himself. But never before had the circumstances been
so difficult. Josephine in no way resembled any woman with whom he had
been involved; she was the first he had taken seriously. Nor did the
other woman resemble the central figure in any of his affairs. He did
not know what she was like, how to classify her; but he did know that
she was unlike any woman he had ever known and that his feeling for her
was different--appallingly different--from any emotion any other woman
had inspired in him. So--a walk alone with Josephine--a first talk with
her after his secret treachery--was no light matter. "Deeper and
deeper," he said to himself. "Where is this going to end?"

She began by sympathizing with him for having so much to do--"and father
says you can get through more work than any man he ever knew, not
excluding himself." She was full of tenderness and compliment, of a kind
of love that made him feel as the dirt