ple, between the
dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged
the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue
and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his
wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.

"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I
told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.

"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I
had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.

"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the
crowd on some other man's arm.

"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that
probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.

That meeting on the stairs!--he made a grievance of it, an injury. The
earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a
general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond
Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging
assertion of power and predominance.

"I shall act," Raymond declared.

"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."

"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a
strong man always finds necessary.

V

Raymond's mind was turning more and more to a set scene with McComas;
some meeting between them was, to his notion, a _scene a faire_. It
seemed demanded by a Gallic sense of form: it must be gone through with
as a requisite to his role of offended husband.

One difficulty was that Raymond fluctuated daily, almost hourly, in his
view of his wife--of _the_ wife, I may say. To-day he took the old
view: the wife was her husband's property and any attempt on her was a
deadly injury to him. To-morrow he took the newer view: the wife was an
individual human being and a free moral agent; therefore a lapse, while
it meant disgrace for her, was, for him, but an affront which he must
endure with dignified composure.

Meanwhile the pair saw little of each other, and Albert, puzzled, began
to enter upon his opportunity (a wide and lingering one it became) for
learning adjustment to awkward and disconcerting conditions.

Well, Raymond had his meeting. Imagine whether it was agreeable. Imagine
whether it was agreeable to me, in whose office it was held. Raymond had
the difficult part of one who must act because he has deliberately
committed himself to action, yet has