w it could be done so easily," Archie observed
breathlessly.

"Anything can be done when you want to, if you have the money," Adelle
replied, evincing how thoroughly she had mastered the philosophy of the
magic lamp.

"And what shall we do now?" her husband inquired.

(They say that in marriage the first trivial events are significant of
what will happen thereafter, like straws upon the stream betraying which
way the current flows. Possibly Archie's question indicates the quality
of this marriage, also the fact that presently Adelle set their course.)

The consular clerk, judging that his compatriots were affluent, had
hinted at the propriety of a wedding feast at the Cafe de Paris; but
Adelle, who hated dinners, vetoed the suggestion. Archie was for
returning unsentimentally to the empty studio for their wedding night,
as they were short of cash and it was after banking hours. But Adelle
had not dashed madly across half of France in the night to spend the
first hours of her honeymoon in a dusty, hot studio on the Rue de
l'Universite. She turned the car into the great Avenue and swept on past
the Arch, through the Bois, out into the open country. Ultimately the
lack of _petrol_ stopped them at a little wayside _cabaret_ some miles
outside of the fortifications, where, too exhausted to proceed farther,
they decided to spend the night.

XXIV

Fortunately Adelle was not of an imaginative habit of mind. She rarely
envisaged with keenness anything of the future, and thus escaped many of
the perplexities and annoyances of life, with some of its pleasures.
Hers was always a single road,--from desire to the gratification of
desire,--as it had been with Archie. Thus far her nature had developed
few disturbing impulses, which accounts for the simple, not to say dull,
character of her story up to the present. Even the supreme desire of
woman's heart had come to her in a commonplace way and had been
fulfilled precipitately, as the desires of the untutored usually are,
but uncomplexly. As she fondly contemplated her husband the next
morning, she did not realize that in one swift day she had accomplished
the main drama of her existence and henceforth must be content with the
humdrum course of life. Archie was scarcely more concerned with mental
complexities.

"Won't Pussy Comstock be jarred!" was about the depth of his reaction to
the momentous step they had taken.

Adelle smiled a wary smile in answer: she distinct