anted
was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What
she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final
blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself
that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for
instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should
the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment
of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a
single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade in livery
she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she
knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the
bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which
was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing
figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told herself that she would
have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the
restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive
to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.

Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant
red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the
histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of
them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she. But
she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend,
Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in
Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read.
Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy
Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse
of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown
creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived. The peace
which she had missed in the thought of her husband came back to her with
the first recollection of her friend, and her hard bright eyes softened
a little while she dwelt on the vivid face of the woman to whom she
clung because of her very unlikeness to herself. Gradually out of the
mist of her unhappiness the figure of Laura rose in the mirror before
her, and she saw clearly her large white forehead under the dark
wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness of her eyes, and the
rapt expectancy of look in which her features were lost as in a genera