he
Azoic motor age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in
visored cap at the wheel.

There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story. For purpose of
fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested. But it is not so
unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars
to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to
remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations,
and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the
left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate
at the end of a front pew.

No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart. It is
possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly. That she
endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children,
and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that. And so she
continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside
her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college Commencement of
their son at Yale. Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in
private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.

But the Wheelers' is another story, also a running social sore; but it
was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told.

As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn fine clothes horse. There
was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as
the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler. She was honed to the ounce. The
white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of
her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray,
and vapor baths saw to that. Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler's, was
unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and,
of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more
than ever.

As I said, she was frankly what she was. No man looked at her more than
once without knowing it. To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her
face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul. The wells of her eyes
were muddy with it.

But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler. He
had no key to the apartment. He never entered her room without knocking.
There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or
another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals. Men
did not always rise from their chairs when she