nd hung it around
Maude's neck.

"How it suits you, Mrs. Paret!" she cried....

This pendant was by no means the only present I had given Maude in recent
years, and though she cared as little for jewels as for dress she seemed
to attach to it a peculiar value and significance that disturbed and
smote me, for the incident had revealed a love unchanged and
unchangeable. Had she taken my gift as a sign that my indifference was
melting?

As I went downstairs and into the library to read the financial page of
the morning newspaper I asked myself, with a certain disquiet, whether,
in the formal, complicated, and luxurious conditions in which we now
lived it might be possible to build up new ties and common interests. I
reflected that this would involve confessions and confidences on my part,
since there was a whole side of my life of which Maude knew nothing. I
had convinced myself long ago that a man's business career was no affair
of his wife's: I had justified that career to myself: yet I had always
had a vague feeling that Maude, had she known the details, would not have
approved of it. Impossible, indeed, for a woman to grasp these problems.
They were outside of her experience.

Nevertheless, something might be done to improve our relationship,
something which would relieve me of that uneasy lack of unity I felt when
at home, of the lassitude and ennui I was wont to feel creeping over me
on Sundays and holidays....

XX.

I find in relating those parts of my experience that seem to be of most
significance I have neglected to tell of my mother's death, which
occurred the year before we moved to Grant Avenue. She had clung the rest
of her days to the house in which I had been born. Of late years she had
lived in my children, and Maude's devotion to her had been unflagging.
Truth compels me to say that she had long ceased to be a factor in my
life. I have thought of her in later years.

Coincident with the unexpected feeling of fruitlessness that came to me
with the Grant Avenue house, of things achieved but not realized or
appreciated, was the appearance of a cloud on the business horizon; or
rather on the political horizon, since it is hard to separate the two
realms. There were signs, for those who could read, of a rising popular
storm. During the earliest years of the new century the political
atmosphere had changed, the public had shown a tendency to grow restless;
and everybody knows how important it is