And it startled him to think that she had, in the
background of her life, a phase of existence so different from anything
with which he had connected her. Varick, whatever his faults, was a
gentleman, in the conventional, traditional sense of the term: the
sense which at that moment seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning
to Waythorn. He and Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same
language, understood the same allusions. But this other man...it was
grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn's mind that Haskett had worn a
made-up tie attached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous detail
symbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by his own
paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him,
became as it were the key to Alice's past. He could see her, as Mrs.
Haskett, sitting in a "front parlor" furnished in plush, with a
pianola, and a copy of "Ben Hur" on the centre-table. He could see her
going to the theatre with Haskett--or perhaps even to a "Church
Sociable"--she in a "picture hat" and Haskett in a black frock-coat, a
little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic. On the way home
they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows, lingering
over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday afternoons
Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of them in a
white enameled perambulator, and Waythorn had a vision of the people
they would stop and talk to. He could fancy how pretty Alice must have
looked, in a dress adroitly constructed from the hints of a New York
fashion-paper; how she must have looked down on the other women,
chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger
place.

For the moment his foremost thought was one of wonder at the way in
which she had shed the phase of existence which her marriage with
Haskett implied. It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every
inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of
her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett she could hardly
have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the
self which had been his wife.

Waythorn started up, checking himself in the analysis of her motives.
What right had he to create a fantastic effigy of her and then pass
judgment on it? She had spoken vaguely of her first marriage as
unhappy, had hinted, with becoming reticence, that Haskett had wrought
havoc among her young illusions....It was a pity