thought; and Arthur, having a reasoning apparatus that worked uncommonly
well when he set it in motion and did not interfere with it, was soon
seeing his situation as a whole much as it was--ugly, mocking, hopeless.

"Maybe Janet knows the real reason why she's acting this way, maybe she
don't," thought he, with the disposition of the inexperienced to give the
benefit of even imaginary doubt. "No matter; the fact is, it's all up
between us." This finality, unexpectedly staring at him, gave him a
shock. "Why," he muttered, "she really has thrown me over! All her talk
was a blind--a trick." And, further exhibiting his youth in holding the
individual responsible for the system of which the individual is merely a
victim, usually a pitiable victim, he went to the opposite extreme and
fell to denouncing her--cold-hearted and mercenary like her mother, a
coward as well as a hypocrite--for, if she had had any of the bravery of
self-respect, wouldn't she have been frank with him? He reviewed her in
the flooding new light upon her character, this light that revealed her
as mercilessly as flash of night-watchman's lantern on guilty, shrinking
form. "She--Why, she always _was_ a fakir!" he exclaimed, stupefied by
the revelation of his own lack of discernment, he who had prided himself
on his acuteness, especially as to women. "From childhood up, she has
always made herself comfortable, no matter who was put out; she has
gotten whatever she wanted, always pretending to be unselfish, always
making it look as if the other person were in the wrong." There he
started up in the rate of the hoodwinked, at the recollection of an
incident of the previous summer--how she had been most gracious to a
young French nobleman, in America in search of a wife; how anybody but
"spiritual" Janet would have been accused of outrageous flirting--no, not
accused, but convicted. He recalled a vague story which he had set down
to envious gossip--a story that the Frenchman had departed on learning
that Charles Whitney had not yet reached the stage of fashionable
education at which the American father appreciates titles and begins to
listen without losing his temper when the subject of settlements is
broached. He remembered now that Janet had been low-spirited for some
time after the Frenchman took himself and title and eloquent eyes and
"soulful, stimulating conversation" to another market. "What a damn fool
I've been!" Arthur all but shouted at his own imag