business; but I don't say it
isn't disgusting. Lindau had a low opinion of it."

"I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than
Lindau," she proclaimed.

"Well, he's certainly able to offer us a better thing in 'Every Other
Week,'" said March.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and
that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the
good-fortune opening to them.

XVII.

Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma
Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the
necessary consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done.
Afterward he lost this clear vision; he began to deny the fact; he drew
upon his knowledge of life, and in arguing himself into a different
frame of mind he alleged the case of different people who had done and
been much worse things than he, and yet no such disagreeable consequence
had befallen them. Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance,
and he said to himself that it was this that made him desperate, and
willing to call evil his good, and to take his own wherever he could
find it. There was a great deal that was literary and factitious and
tawdry in the mood in which he went to see Christine Dryfoos, the night
when the Marches sat talking their prospects over; and nothing that was
decided in his purpose. He knew what the drift of his mind was, but he
had always preferred to let chance determine his events, and now since
chance had played him such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole
responsibility. Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought as
he walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had
practically invited him to resume. He had an insolent satisfaction in
having delayed it so long; if he was going back he was going back on his
own conditions, and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could
make them. But this intention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff
of an intention, rather than intention; an expression of temperament
chiefly.

He had been expected before that. Christine had got out of Mela that her
father had been at Beaton's studio; and then she had gone at the old
man and got from him every smallest fact of the interview there. She had
flung back in his teeth the good-will toward herself with which he had
gone to Beaton. She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him
he had made bad worse, tha