ittle policeman instead."

And Alma smiled back, out of the agony of her constant consciousness
that she was insinuating her presence upon him, and resolutely, so that
her fear for him should always subordinate her fear of him, she bit down
her sensitiveness in proportion to the rising tide of his growing, but
still politely held in check, bewilderment.

Once, these first weeks of their marriage, because she saw the dreaded
signal of the muddy pools under her mother's eyes and the little
quivering nerve beneath the temple, she shut him out of her presence for
a day and a night, and when he came fuming up every few minutes from the
hotel veranda, miserable and fretting, met him at the closed door of her
mother's darkened room and was adamant.

"It won't hurt if I tiptoe in and sit with her," he pleaded.

"No, Louis. No one knows how to get her through these spells like I do.
The least excitement will only prolong her pain."

He trotted off, then, down the hotel corridor, with a strut to his
resentment that was bantam and just a little fighty.

That night as Alma lay beside her mother, holding off sleep and
watching, Carrie rolled her eyes side-wise with the plea of a stricken
dog in them.

"Alma," she whispered, "for God's sake! Just this once. To tide me over.
One shot--darling. Alma, if you love me?"

Later there was a struggle between them that hardly bears relating. A
lamp was overturned. But toward morning, when Carrie lay exhausted, but
at rest in her daughter's arms, she kept muttering in her sleep:

"Thank you, baby. You saved me. Never leave me, Alma.
Never--never--never. You saved me, Alma."

And then the miracle of those next months. The return to New York. The
happily busy weeks of furnishing and the unlimited gratifications of the
well-filled purse. The selection of the limousine with the special body
that was fearfully and wonderfully made in mulberry upholstery with
mother-of-pearl caparisons. The fourteen-room apartment on West End
Avenue with four baths, drawing-room of pink-brocaded walls, and
Carrie's Roman bathroom that was precisely as large as her old hotel
sitting room, with two full-length wall mirrors, a dressing table
canopied in white lace over white satin, and the marble bath itself, two
steps down and with rubber curtains that swished after.

There were evenings when Carrie, who loved the tyranny of things with
what must have been a survival within her of the bazaar instinct, woul