tter with the steam," she answered, with
the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have
to work for a living.

"Well, take your writer into my room. There's a fire in the stove
there," said Lapham, passing out.

Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office. She had passed
the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the
mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no
longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of
trial and left him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame
and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the
real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him
hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It astounded her that such a thing
should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good
woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her
husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and
wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt. But she
had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his
own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the
thing that had played her false; that she had kept her mind so long
upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man
that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation
for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of
roguery as the means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him
if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the
harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she owned her
limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished
the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her
intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be
right, and nothing else. She admired and revered him for going beyond
her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had
determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and
would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.

She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her
heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of
the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she
wished that those days were back again. She saw Corey at his desk, and
she could not