Josephine, deeply in love, was showing herself to Norman in
her undisguised natural sweet simplicity--and monotony. But, while men
admire and reverence a sweet and simple feminine soul--and love her in
plays and between the covers of a book and when she is talking
highfaluting abstractions of morality--and wax wroth with any other man
who ignores or neglects her--they do not in their own persons become
infatuated with her. Passion is too much given to moods for that; it has
a morbid craving for variety, for the mysterious and the baffling.

The only thing that saves the race from ruin through passion is the
rarity of those by nature or by art expert in using it. Norman felt that
he was paying the penalty for his persistent search for this rarity; one
of the basest tricks of destiny upon man is to give him what he
wants--wealth, or fame, or power, or the woman who enslaves. Norman
felt that destiny had suddenly revealed its resolve to destroy him by
giving him not one of the things he wanted, but all.

The marriage was not quite two weeks away. About the time that the
ordinary plausible excuses for Norman's neglect, his abstraction, his
seeming indifference were exhausted, Josephine's vanity came forward to
explain everything to her, all to her own glory. As the elysian hour
approached--so vanity assured her--the man who loved her as her complex
soul and many physical and social advantages deserved was overcome with
that shy terror of which she had read in the poets and the novelists. A
large income, fashionable attire and surroundings, a carriage and a
maid--these things gave a woman a subtle and superior intellect and
soul. How? Why? No one knew. But everyone admitted, indeed saw, the
truth. Further, these beings--these great ladies--according to all the
accredited poets, novelists, and other final authorities upon
life--always inspired the most awed and worshipful and diffident
feelings in their lovers. Therefore, she--the great lady--was getting
but her due. She would have liked something else--something common and
human--much better. But, having always led her life as the conventions
dictated, never as the common human heart yearned, she had no keen sense
of dissatisfaction to rouse her to revolt and to question. Also, she was
breathlessly busy with trousseau and the other arrangements for the
grand wedding.

One afternoon she telephoned Norman asking him to come on his way home
that evening. "I particularly wish