bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need
not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham's room, and opening the door
without knocking, shut it behind her.

Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband
was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating
a typewriter. She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the
scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not
personally interesting to them. It vexed the wife that any one else
should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once
been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl's
indifference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one
corner, and Lapham's office coat, looking intensely like him to his
wife's familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs.
Lapham liked even less than the girl's good looks this domestication of
her garments in her husband's office. She began to ask herself
excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to
come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out
of her unreasonableness.

"When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?" she sharply asked of
the girl.

"I couldn't say exactly," replied the girl, without looking round.

"Has he been out long?"

"I don't know as I noticed," said the girl, looking up at the clock,
without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working her machine.

"Well, I can't wait any longer," said the wife abruptly. "When Colonel
Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs. Lapham wants to see him."

The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham with a red
and startled face, which she did not lift to confront her.
"Yes--yes--I will," she faltered.

The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an irritation
about this girl which she could not quell or account for. She found
her husband's message, and it seemed intolerable that he should have
gone to New York without seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the
mysterious business could be that took him away so suddenly. She said
to herself that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little
too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never mentioned that
girl there in his office, she forgot how much she had left herself out
of his business life. That was another curse of their prosperity.
Well, she was glad the prosperity was going; it had ne