lighting a
cigarette; "I shall work them off and see a profit."

Osborn's year now took on for him the aspect of the most magnificent
adventure sated married man ever had.

"Fancy us two trotting about the good old earth together!"

"Don't tell your friends," she laughed.

"Trust me."

"But I don't. I don't trust any of you."

"You are a tease. Roselle, it's so tophole to see you again; let me
kiss you good morning."

She took the cigarette from her mouth to return his kiss; she was
bright-eyed and hilarious. She knew that he was a fool as men were,
unless they were brutes; and you had to make the fools whipping-boys
for the brutes. As he kissed her, she knew that she was going to use
him; to take all and give nothing.

"You're the dearest boy. And how's the car?"

"She's first-rate. Want her this morning?"

"You might run me around in her; job-hunting."

Into the spring sun they drove; she had the inevitable fur coat and
the hat he loved, and she looked beautiful. By the time he ranked the
car outside one of Chicago's best restaurants for lunch, she had what
she called a pocketful of contracts, to sing at this restaurant and
that; to dance for her supper and half a guinea at a ruinous night
club, for she could do everything a little. But her greatest asset was
her beauty.

CHAPTER XIX

ANOTHER WOOING

Osborn's letters told Marie very little of his doings; they almost
conveyed the impression, though he would have been uneasy to know it,
of careful epistles penned by a bad schoolboy. His letters from
Chicago might have been replicas of those from New York; from Montreal
he began on the same old note, though, in answer to her request to
teach a stay-at-home woman descriptive geography, he once launched
forth into an elaborate account of his rail journey on the Canadian
Pacific, from Montreal westwards. Marie was not disappointed in the
letters; they were what she would have expected. But sometimes, as she
read their terse and uninteresting sentences, their stodgy bits of
information, she smiled to think how marriage changed a man.

How dull it made him!

How irritating and constrained it made him! How prosaic! How it
walled-up passion, as one read how a nun who had loved too much was
walled-up, in the old fierce days, with bricks and mortar!

"MY DEAR MARIE," (or sometimes "Dear Wifie"),--

"How are you all getting along? I'm in ---- now, as you will see by
my changed address. Busin