ed to herself a home, happiness, and a life of plenty, but she
held herself at the highest price a woman demands.

That price Augustus Carline was only too willing to pay. He had found a
girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness
of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of
everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days
mansion in Gage.

There he installed her with everything he thought she needed,
and--pursued his usual futile life. Too late she learned that he was
weak, insignificant, and, like her own father, no 'count. Augustus
Carline was a brute, a creature of appetites and desires, who by no
chance rose to the heights of his wife's mental demands.

Nelia Carline regarded the tragedy of her life with impatience. She
studied the looking glass to see wherein she had failed to measure up to
her duty; she ransacked her mind, and compared it with all the women she
met by virtue of her place as Gus Carline's wife. Those women had not
proved to be what she had expected grand dames of society to be.

"I want to talk learning," she told herself, "and they talk hairpins and
dirty dishes and Bill-don't-behave!"

Now one of those women, a kind of a grass widow, Mrs. Plosell, had
attracted Gus Carline, and when he came home from her house, he was
always drunk. When Nelia remonstrated, he was ugly. He had thrown her
down and gone back to the grass widow's the night before. Nelia
considered that grim fact, and, having made up her mind, acted.

In her years of poverty she had learned many things, and now she put
into service certain practical ideas. She had certain rights, under the
law, since she had taken the name of Augustus Carline. There were, too,
moral rights, and she preferred to exercise her moral rights.

Part of the Carline fortune was in unregistered stocks and bonds, and
when Gus Carline returned from the widow's one day he found that Nelia
was in great good humour, more attractive than he had ever known her,
and so very pleasant during the two days of his headache that he was
willing to do anything she asked.

She asked him to have a good time with her, and put down on the table
before him a filled punch bowl and two glasses. He had never known the
refinements of intoxicating liquors. Now he found them in his own home,
and for a while forgot all else.

He sang, danced, laughed and, in due course, signed a number of papers,
receipts,