excursions, the days simply flew for Toni; so that at
last even Owen began to realize that he need not pity her, since she was
living a life which exactly suited her.

Once he realized this, his pity was directed towards himself.

This was not the sort of married life he had contemplated; and although
he was too just to blame his wife for her lack of sympathy with his aims
and ideals, he began to wish that Toni would sometimes lay aside her
frivolity and exchange her light and ceaseless chatter about trifling
matters for a slightly more profitable style of conversation.

Owen had called upon James Herrick at his bungalow, the Hope House, to
thank him for rescuing Toni; and the other man had duly returned his
call; but although Owen gave Herrick a very cordial general invitation
to Greenriver the two men had not much in common save a mutual love of
good books.

Owen thought Herrick peculiar, eccentric in his ways. It seemed odd for
a man to live alone as he lived, doing his own work except for the
occasional aid of a woman whom he called Mrs. Swastika. If he had had
any particular work or hobby which necessitated solitude Owen could have
understood it; but Herrick seemed to spend his days as idly, as
aimlessly, as Toni herself.

He went on the river a good deal, took long walks with his dog, but
beyond that he seemed to do nothing but lounge in a chair on the lawn,
shabbily clad, with a pipe between his lips and a book, generally
unopened, on his knee. His political views seemed to Owen to be as vague
as were Toni's; and he had an irritating habit of setting aside any
recognized standard of perfection as though the world's seal of approval
meant less than nothing.

He would demolish a given institution in a few lazy words, but he never
attempted to set up another in its place. He seemed content to put his
finger on the weak spot in any system without troubling to point out a
remedy; and to Owen, whose eager mind was ever ready to remedy abuses,
this attitude of half-pitying, half-amused toleration was vaguely
irritating.

Herrick seemed to view life, indeed, with a kind of large detachment, as
though from the height of some soaring pinnacle one might watch, with
only half-awakened interest, the doings of the dwellers on the plain;
and Owen, who liked to be in the midst of things, to add his quota to
the world's doings, found in this attitude of mind a pose, a
half-insolent pretence at superiority, which was galli