caused Rod to regard him as the safest of the safe. For it made
him pitiful and ridiculous.

At first he came only with Spenser. Afterward, Spenser used to
send him to dine with Susan and to spend the evenings with her
when he himself had to be--or wished to be elsewhere. When she
was with Drumley he knew she was not "up to any of her old
tricks." Drumley fell in love with her; but, as in his
experience the female sex was coldly chaste, he never developed
even the slight hope necessary to start in a man's mind the idea
of treachery to his friend about a woman. Whenever Drumley heard
that a woman other than the brazenly out and out disreputables
was "loose" or was inclined that way, he indignantly denied it
as a libel upon the empedestaled sex. If proofs beyond dispute
were furnished, he raved against the man with all the venom of
the unsuccessful hating the successful for their success. He had
been sought of women, of course, for he had a comfortable and
secure position and money put by. But the serious women who had
set snares for him for the sake of a home had not attracted him;
as for the better looking and livelier women who had come
a-courting with alimony in view, they had unwisely chosen the
method of approach that caused him to set them down as nothing
but professional loose characters. Thus his high ideal of
feminine beauty and his lofty notion of his own deserts, on the
one hand, and his reverence for womanly propriety, on the other
hand, had kept his charms and his income unshared.

Toward the end of Spenser's first year on the _Herald_--it was
early summer--he fell into a melancholy so profound and so
prolonged that Susan became alarmed. She was used to his having
those fits of the blues that are a part of the nervous, morbidly
sensitive nature and in the unhealthfulness of an irregular and
dissipated life recur at brief intervals. He spent more and more
time with her, became as ardent as in their first days together,
with an added desperation of passionate clinging that touched
her to the depths. She had early learned to ignore his moods, to
avoid sympathy which aggravates, and to meet his blues with a
vigorous counterirritant of liveliness. After watching the
course of this acute attack for more than a month, she decided
that at the first opportunity she would try to find out from
Drumley what the cause was. Perhaps she could cure him if she
were not working in the dark.

One June even