ng-pictures, but generally the quiet evening, he reading the
_Encyclopaedia_--aloud now--Minnie darning his socks, but never
ceasing to listen.

Each day brought the same sense of grateful amazement that he should be
so wonderfully happy, so extraordinarily peaceful. Everything was as
perfect as it could be. Minnie was looking a different girl. She had
lost her drawn look. She was filling out.

Sometimes he would suspend his reading for a moment, and look across at
her. At first he would see only her soft hair, as she bent over her
sewing. Then, wondering at the silence, she would look up, and he would
meet her big eyes. And then Henry would gurgle with happiness, and
demand of himself, silently:

'Can you beat it!'

It was the anniversary of their wedding. They celebrated it in fitting
style. They dined at a crowded and exhilarating Italian restaurant on a
street off Seventh Avenue, where red wine was included in the bill, and
excitable people, probably extremely clever, sat round at small tables
and talked all together at the top of their voices. After dinner they
saw a musical comedy. And then--the great event of the night--they
went on to supper at a glittering restaurant near Times Square.

There was something about supper at an expensive restaurant which had
always appealed to Henry's imagination. Earnest devourer as he was of
the solids of literature, he had tasted from time to time its lighter
face--those novels which begin with the hero supping in the midst of
the glittering throng and having his attention attracted to a
distinguished-looking elderly man with a grey imperial who is entering
with a girl so strikingly beautiful that the revellers turn, as she
passes, to look after her. And then, as he sits and smokes, a waiter
comes up to the hero and, with a soft '_Pardon, m'sieu!_' hands
him a note.

The atmosphere of Geisenheimer's suggested all that sort of thing to
Henry. They had finished supper, and he was smoking a cigar--his second
that day. He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the scene. He felt
braced up, adventurous. He had that feeling, which comes to all quiet
men who like to sit at home and read, that this was the sort of
atmosphere in which he really belonged. The brightness of it all--the
dazzling lights, the music, the hubbub, in which the deep-throated
gurgle of the wine-agent surprised while drinking soup blended with the
shriller note of the chorus-girl calling to her mate--these t