left by his father,
had barely met the demands of his art education. But youth and health
and enthusiasm were his, and such success as he had achieved came easily
and naturally. So he had grown accustomed to believe that destiny held
in store for him pretty much what he wanted.

His marriage with Jane, entered into on the impulse of the moment, was
characteristic of the way his life had been ordered--or unordered. He
had drifted along, taking what he wanted with a sort of unconscious
selfishness as a central motive force. This was poor training for
disappointment or tragedy.

Arrived at the studio, he tried to paint, but he could not put his mind
on his canvas, so after an hour of labour lost, he gave it up. He
wandered about the empty house, where every spot, every room, spoke of
Jane and the baby. He could not bear it. He went to the club for lunch,
but the men at his table poked fun at his gloom so he left them in a
rage. He went to some picture exhibitions he had been meaning to see,
but they bored him. He dodged a fellow artist or two, because he didn't
want to talk. He tramped up the Avenue and through the Park.

Finally he gave up fighting his thoughts, he let them come. He had gone
over the scene with Christiansen thousands of times. Sometimes it ran
off in his mind as it had really happened. Sometimes he fell upon his
enemy and beat him, sometimes he even killed him, but always the scene
was dominated by Jane, who, for the first time in his acquaintance with
her, was deeply moved, shaken to the very depths of her being. He
realized it fully; it was the thing that frightened him. Jane was so
sure, so true to herself. If, thus aroused, she saw her relation to
Jerry in a new light, nothing on earth would keep her from severing that
relation. It must be that she loved Christiansen, for he, Jerry, had
never roused her so.

He thought back over the years, from the time she had applied to him for
work, up to now. The years of the silent, mysterious Jane, coming and
going like a silhouette against the screen of the studios. Her quiet
sense of power had been like a pillow for them all to rest on. What a
fool he had been not to see that power like that generated itself and
spread like electricity.

He went over the weeks before the pageant, when he had forced her into a
more personal relation with him. He recalled the really deep impression
she had made on him, on all the audience, the night of the pageant
itself.