riorated by it. The fact that Alice took her change of husbands
like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity. He could
have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett,
for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact.
She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt
and she knew they would never cut her.

And then, gradually, habit formed a protecting surface for his
sensibilities. If he paid for each day's comfort with the small change
of his illusions, he grew daily to value the comfort more and set less
store upon the coin. He had drifted into a dulling propinquity with
Haskett and Varick and he took refuge in the cheap revenge of
satirizing the situation. He even began to reckon up the advantages
which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a
third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who
had lacked opportunity to acquire the art. For it _was_ an art, and
made up, like all others, of concessions, eliminations and
embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and shadows skillfully
softened. His wife knew exactly how to manage the lights, and he knew
exactly to what training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the
source of his obligations, to discriminate between the influences which
had combined to produce his domestic happiness: he perceived that
Haskett's commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while
Varick's liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to
value the conjugal virtues; so that he was directly indebted to his
predecessors for the devotion which made his life easy if not inspiring.

From this phase he passed into that of complete acceptance. He ceased
to satirize himself because time dulled the irony of the situation and
the joke lost its humor with its sting. Even the sight of Haskett's hat
on the hall table had ceased to touch the springs of epigram. The hat
was often seen there now, for it had been decided that it was better
for Lily's father to visit her than for the little girl to go to his
boarding-house. Waythorn, having acquiesced in this arrangement, had
been surprised to find how little difference it made. Haskett was never
obtrusive, and the few visitors who met him on the stairs were unaware
of his identity. Waythorn did not know how often he saw Alice, but with
himself Haskett was seldom in contact.

One afternoon, however, he learned