country on a
margin, and she was now trembling, every Sabbath hour, lest through some
chance word of hers he find it out. In her misery and remorse for this
treachery she could not keep her heart from going out to him in pity;
she was filled with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and
contented, and ever suspecting. Never suspecting--trusting her with
a perfect and pathetic trust, and she holding over him by a thread a
possible calamity of so devastating a--

"SAY--Aleck?"

The interrupting words brought her suddenly to herself. She was grateful
to have that persecuting subject from her thoughts, and she answered,
with much of the old-time tenderness in her tone:

"Yes, dear."

"Do you know, Aleck, I think we are making a mistake--that is, you
are. I mean about the marriage business." He sat up, fat and froggy and
benevolent, like a bronze Buddha, and grew earnest. "Consider--it's more
than five years. You've continued the same policy from the start: with
every rise, always holding on for five points higher. Always when I
think we are going to have some weddings, you see a bigger thing ahead,
and I undergo another disappointment. _I_ think you are too hard to
please. Some day we'll get left. First, we turned down the dentist and
the lawyer. That was all right--it was sound. Next, we turned down the
banker's son and the pork-butcher's heir--right again, and sound. Next,
we turned down the Congressman's son and the Governor's--right as
a trivet, I confess it. Next the Senator's son and the son of the
Vice-President of the United States--perfectly right, there's no
permanency about those little distinctions. Then you went for the
aristocracy; and I thought we had struck oil at last--yes. We would
make a plunge at the Four Hundred, and pull in some ancient lineage,
venerable, holy, ineffable, mellow with the antiquity of a hundred and
fifty years, disinfected of the ancestral odors of salt-cod and pelts
all of a century ago, and unsmirched by a day's work since, and then!
why, then the marriages, of course. But no, along comes a pair a real
aristocrats from Europe, and straightway you throw over the half-breeds.
It was awfully discouraging, Aleck! Since then, what a procession!
You turned down the baronets for a pair of barons; you turned down the
barons for a pair of viscounts; the viscounts for a pair of earls; the
earls for a pair of marquises; the marquises for a brace of dukes. NOW,
Aleck, cash in!--you've