s," answered Honora, pulling down the newspaper from before his face.
"For one thing, I'm not going to allow you to be a bear any more. I don't
mean a Stock Exchange bear, but a domestic bear--which is much worse.
You've got to notice me once in a while. If you don't, I'll get another
husband. That's what women do in these days, you know, when the one they
have doesn't take the trouble to make himself sufficiently agreeable. I'm
sure I could get another one quite easily," she declared.

He looked up at her as she stood facing him in the lamplight before the
fire, and was forced to admit to himself that the boast was not wholly
idle. A smile was on her lips, her eyes gleamed with health; her furs
--of silver fox--were thrown back, the crimson roses pinned on her mauve
afternoon gown matched the glow in her cheeks, while her hair mingled
with the dusky shadows. Howard Spence experienced one of those startling,
illuminating moments which come on occasions to the busy and
self-absorbed husbands of his nation. Psychologists have a name for such
a phenomenon. Ten minutes before, so far as his thoughts were concerned,
she had not existed, and suddenly she had become a possession which he
had not, in truth, sufficiently prized. Absurd though it was, the
possibility which she had suggested aroused in him a slight uneasiness.

"You are a deuced good-looking woman, I'll say that for you, Honora," he
admitted.

"Thanks," she answered, mockingly, and put her hands behind her back. "If
I had only known you were going to settle down in Rivington and get fat
and bald and wear dressing gowns and be a bear, I never should have
married you--never, never, never! Oh, how young and simple and foolish I
was! And the magnificent way you talked about New York, and intimated
that you were going to conquer the world. I believed you. Wasn't I a
little idiot not--to know that you'd make for a place like this and dig a
hole and stay in it, and let the world go hang?"

He laughed, though it was a poor attempt. And she read in his eyes, which
had not left her face, that he was more or less disturbed.

"I treat you pretty well, don't I, Honora?" he asked. There was an
amorous, apologetic note in his voice that amused her, and reminded her
of the honeymoon. "I give you all the money you want or rather--you take
it,--and I don't kick up a row, except when the market goes to pieces--"

"When you act as though we'd have to live in Harlem--which couldn'