it."

"I shall never be able to do anything with him as long as he sees that his
mistakes are being condoned by you," bitterly responded the mother. "Some
day he will humiliate us all by his carelessness."

"Oh, bother!" Nora's elbow slyly dug into Celeste's side.

The pianist's pretty face was bent over her soup. She had grown accustomed
to these little daily rifts. For the great, patient, clumsy,
happy-go-lucky man she entertained an intense pity. But it was not the
kind that humiliates; on the contrary, it was of a mothering disposition;
and the ex-gladiator dimly recognized it, and felt more comfortable with
her than with any other woman excepting Nora. She understood him perhaps
better than either mother or daughter; he was too late: he belonged to a
distant time, the beginning of the Christian era; and often she pictured
him braving the net and the trident in the saffroned arena.

Mrs. Harrigan broke her bread vexatiously. Her husband refused to think
for himself, and it was wearing on her nerves to watch him day and night.
Deep down under the surface of new adjustments and social ambitions, deep
in the primitive heart, he was still her man. But it was only when he
limped with an occasional twinge of rheumatism, or a tooth ached, or he
dallied with his meals, that the old love-instinct broke up through these
artificial crustations. True, she never knew how often he invented these
trivial ailments, for he soon came into the knowledge that she was less
concerned about him when he was hale and hearty. She still retained
evidences of a blossomy beauty. Abbott had once said truly that nature had
experimented on her; it was in the reproduction that perfection had been
reached. To see the father, the mother, and the daughter together it was
not difficult to fashion a theory as to the latter's splendid health and
physical superiority. Arriving at this point, however, theory began to
fray at the ends. No one could account for the genius and the voice. The
mother often stood lost in wonder that out of an ordinary childhood, a
barelegged, romping, hoydenish childhood, this marvel should emerge:
her's!

She was very ambitious for her daughter. She wanted to see nothing less
than a ducal coronet upon the child's brow, British preferred. If ordinary
chorus girls and vaudeville stars, possessing only passable beauty and no
intelligence whatever, could bring earls into their nets, there was no
reason why Nora could not be a