iscipline. His present life of comparative ease and
expected wealth was the very worst thing for him as man and as artist.
Like an over-fertilized plant he went to leaf and bore little fruit. And
thus again Clark's Field, with its delayed expectations, had a baleful
influence upon a new generation of human beings. The Davises had just
enough money to wander loose over Europe, disturbed, as Addie had once
been disturbed, by the hope of a more golden future.

Adelle herself was content not to work hard at the manufacture of
jewelry, although if she had been encouraged, she might have become
almost second-rate in this minor art. She, too, was indolent, if not by
disposition, by training, and Europe offers abundant distraction of a
semi-intellectual sort to fill the days of people like Archie and
Adelle. To loaf herself was not so fatal for Adelle as to acquiesce in
Archie's loafing, to accept the parasitic notion for her man that
obtained in the easy-going circles she knew. "Oh, well," she said to
Sadie, "why should Archie work if he doesn't want to?"

Sadie saw no reason and suggested,--"There isn't one of those painters
who would stick at it if he didn't have to."

Like all poor people, they hadn't any luck; that was her idea. And
Adelle cultivated another dangerous conception of marriage.

"It's enough for me if he's good to me and loves me--I have plenty of
money for us both."

In other words, she thought that she should be satisfied to keep her
lover always as an appanage of her magic lamp, to maintain a human being
and a male human being as she might maintain a motor-car or an estate or
a stable, as something desirable and pleasurable, contributing to her
happiness,--the privilege of her fortunate position as a woman of means.
There were many rich women who had that idea or cultivated it as a
solace to their defeated souls.

"Isn't he a dear?" she would say to Sadie Paul in these moments of proud
consciousness of possession; and conversely she would say sternly when
some case of masculine errancy was brought to her notice,--"If Archie
treated me like that, he'd find his bag packed and sitting outside the
door!"

So she was very fussy about her husband's appearance,--his dress and
manners and appointments; and insisted upon giving him every accessory
of luxury, everything that rich men supposably enjoy. As her nearest and
dearest possession, she was more concerned with his brave appearance
than she was with he