r own. She "dolled" him up, as Sadie Paul laughingly
called it. "Isn't he cunning?" was one of her common expressions of
marital happiness. Occasionally, in more serious moods, she might talk
largely about Archie's "going into business" when they "got their
money," but as time went on and Archie displayed little aptitude for
managing money, she talked less about this. Adelle would have been
content to buy the Basque villa they had rented and establish herself
and Archie there in complete idleness and luxury, provided he would
always be "good" to her, by which she meant faithful to those
unconsidered marriage vows made in the Paris consulate, and not too
cross.

And thus Archie and Adelle drifted on towards that great date of their
complete emancipation from control, when all the riches of Clark's
Field, now accumulating in the trust company's pool, should be handed
over to them. That would be, indeed, the ultimate crisis for the old
Field, when, having been finally transmuted into coin of the realm, it
should cease to have an entity or any personal relation with the Clark
race!

Meantime Archie and Adelle were not vicious, though Archie drank too
much for his digestion and was often peevish in consequence, and Adelle
was almost aimless and lazy enough to be described as vicious. Yet they
were no worse than many, many other well-to-do young persons with no
deep roots, no permanent incentives, no profound passions to give them
significance. Likely enough they might have ended in some charming
English country house, or Roman palace, or pink-and-white villa along
the Mediterranean,--if their fate had not been still involved with
Clark's Field. They would have become perfectly respectable, utterly
negligible modern citizens of the world,--the infertile by-product of a
rich civilization with its perfected machinery for the preservation of
accumulated wealth. There are more Archies and Adelles about us than is
commonly recognized: they are on all our calling-lists, in every
European capital or congregation of expensive country homes. Their names
stud the "blue books" and the "red books" of conventional "society."
They fill the great hotels and the mammoth steamships. They, in sum,
make up a large part of that fine fruit of civilization for which the
immense majority toil, and for whom serious people plan and legislate,
for whom laws are interpreted and trust companies formed in order to
handle the money they themselves are i