r. He was rich, he was popular, he was
a dictator in his quiet way. And she knew even if the shock of his
wife's sudden going had pushed his thought of her into the background,
that in a few months he would be hovering about her again,
conventionally freed for conventional devotion.

She saw all this, and for the first time to-day she saw other things,
too. That he was forty, and looked it. That there was just the faintest
suggestion of thinning in his smooth hair, where Wolf's magnificent mane
was the thickest. That it was just a little bloodless, this decorous
mourning that had so instantly engulfed him, who had actually told her,
another man's wife, a few weeks before, that his own wife was dying, and
so would free him for the woman he loved at last!

In short, Norma mused, watching him as he fell into moody silence, he
had not scrupled to break the spirit of his bond to Alice, he had not
hesitated to tell Norma that he loved her when only Norma, and possibly
Alice, might suffer from his disloyalty. But when the sacred letter was
touched, the sacred outside of the vessel that must be kept clean before
the world, then Chris was instantly the impeccable, the irreproachable
man of his caste again. It was all part of the superficial smallness of
that world where arbitrary form ruled, where to send a wedding
invitation printed and not engraved, or to mispronounce the name of a
visiting Italian tenor or Russian dancer, would mark the noblest woman
in the world as hopelessly "not belonging."

"One of the things you do that really you oughtn't to, Norma," he
resumed, presently, in quiet distaste, "is assume that there is some
mysterious difference between, say, the Craigies, and well--your
husband. The Craigies are enormously wealthy, of course. That means that
they have always had fine service, music, travel, the best of everything
in educational ways, friendship with the best people--and those things
_are_ an advantage, generation after generation. It's absurd to deny
that Annie's children, for example, haven't any real and tremendous
advantages over--well, some child of a perfectly respectable family that
manages nicely on ten thousand a year. But that Annie's pleasures are
not as real, or that there must necessarily be something
dangerous--something detestable--in the life of the best people, is
ridiculous!"

"That's just what I do assert," she answered, bravely. "It may not be so
for you, for you were born to it! Bu