ll pretend to myself," she said, "that that is why you have given
up your trip. But I'm afraid it isn't your father and me that you've
suddenly grown so fond of."

"Now look here, mamma," I said, "we thrashed that all out the other
day."

"Thrashed all what out?--Oh, I remember--your attentions to Lucy
Fulton, or hers to you, which was it?"

"It wasn't our attentions to each other, as I remember. It was the
attention which Aiken is or was paying to us."

"So it was," said my mother.

She gave me, then, a second cup of tea, and talked cheerfully of other
things. Some people came in, and I managed presently to escape from
them.

It hadn't been easy to tell my mother that I had given up the
California trip. I knew that her triple intuition would connect the
change of plan with Lucy Fulton, and I was not in the mood to meet such
an accusation with the banter and levity which it no longer deserved.

Like it or not, I was staying on in Aiken because Lucy had asked me to.
That we had been gossiped about had angered me; but it could do so no
longer. That we were good friends, and enjoyed riding and being
together, was no longer the whole truth. There was in addition this:
that Lucy no longer loved her husband, and that she had made me her
confidant.

From the first to the last of my dressing for dinner that night,
everything went wrong. I stepped into a cold tub, under the impression
that I had told my man to run a hot one. He had laid out for me an
undershirt that had lost all its buttons, and a pair of socks that I
hated. I broke the buckle of the belt that I always wear with my
dinner trousers; I dropped my watch face downward on the brick hearth,
and I spilled a cocktail all over my dress shirt, _after_ I had got my
collar on and tied my tie!

Usually such a succession of misadventures would have given rise to one
rage after another. But I was too busy thinking about Lucy. I could
no longer deny that she attracted me immensely. Perhaps she had from
the beginning. I can't be sure. But I should never have confessed
this to myself, or so I think, if I had not learned that she had
suddenly fallen out of love with her husband. In that ideal state of
matrimony, in which I had first gotten to know her, she had seemed a
holy thing upon a plane far above this covetous world. But now the
angel had fallen out of that which had been her heaven, and come down
to earth. That I had had anything to do with this