ul,
but no soul at all. And his whole mental attitude toward her
changed; or, rather, it was changed by the iron compulsion of
his prejudice. The only change in his physical attitude--that is,
in his treatment of her--was in the direction of bolder passion.
of complete casting aside of all the restraint a conventional
respecter of conventional womanhood feels toward a woman whom he
respects. So, naturally, Susan, eager to love and to be loved,
and easily confusing the not easily distinguished spiritual and
physical, was reassured. Once in a while a look or a phrase from
him gave her vague uneasiness; but on the whole she felt that,
in addition to clear conscience from straightforwardness, she
had a further reason for being glad Chance had forced upon her
the alternative of telling him or lying. She did not inquire
into the realities beneath the surface of their life--neither
into what he thought of her, nor into what she thought of
him--thought in the bottom of her heart. She continued to fight
against, to ignore, her feeling of aloneness, her feeling of
impending departure.

She was aided in this by her anxiety about their finances. In
his efforts to place his play he was spending what were for them
large sums of money--treating this man and that to dinners, to
suppers--inviting men to lunch with him at expensive Broadway
restaurants. She assumed that all this was necessary; he said
so, and he must know. He was equally open-handed when they were
alone, insisting on ordering the more expensive dishes, on
having suppers they really did not need and drink which she knew
she would be better off without--and, she suspected, he also. It
simply was not in him, she saw, to be careful about money. She
liked it, as a trait, for to her as to all the young and the
unthinking carelessness about money seems a sure, perhaps the
surest, sign of generosity--when in fact the two qualities are
in no way related. Character is not a collection of ignorant
impulses but a solidly woven fabric of deliberate purposes.
Carelessness about anything most often indicates a tendency to
carelessness about everything. She admired his openhanded way of
scattering; she wouldn't have admired it in herself, would have
thought it dishonest and selfish. But Rod was different. _He_ had
the "artistic temperament," while she was a commonplace nobody,
who ought to be--and was--grateful to him for allowing her to
stay on and for making such us