glad life's arrears'--the natural
penalty of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which
life, as we know it, is inconsistent.

How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman who was an
expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. In memory afterward
it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The low voice, the splendid dress,
the scented room came back to him, and a confused memory of his own
futile struggle to ward off what she was bent on saying--little else. He
had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his presence of mind. Any man
of the world of his acquaintance, he believed, trampling on himself,
would have done better.

But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and
humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared,
and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant
underself suddenly brought into the light of day,--from that point
onward, in after days, he remembered it all.

'... I know,' cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, standing at bay
before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips quivering, when
her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse left was to strike the
man who had humiliated her-'I know that you and your puritanical wife
are miserable--_miserable_. What is the use of denying facts that all
the world can see, that you have taken pains,' and she laid a fierce,
deliberate emphasis on each word, 'all the world shall see? There,--let
your wife's ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious relation to
her, be my excuse, if I wanted any; but'--and she shrugged her white
shoulders passionately--'I want _none!_ I am not responsible to your
petty codes. Nature and feeling are enough for me. I saw you wanting
sympathy and affection----'

'My wife!' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then,
his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step
forward.

'Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you
are a woman, and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my
own blindness and folly----'

'Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with mocking
suddenness, throwing, herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a
change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and
shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint
had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness
which he