ister was not to be
misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her
as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him;
and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast
indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told
her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman,
sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take
men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may
the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to
overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either
field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not,
in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well
nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her
to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason
to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By
which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been
kindled in her maiden heart.

As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not
greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the
resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the
point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same
hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many
facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the
ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude
toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so
faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such
men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating
instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on
occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them
into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was
libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home
of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for
the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them
overlying the coal measures.

The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to
Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was
in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter.