s perfumed suit and the cheap
jewelry and take my wife where she can have a chance to forget I ever
wore them."

"But I _like_ them," put in Phillida ardently. "Please do not fuss so,
Ethan; because I really do."

"Do you?" I turned upon her. "Are you sure, then, that it is not all
this cabaret glamour you really are in love with? Would you care for him
as an ordinary, hard-working fellow in a pair of overalls and a flannel
shirt? No applause, no lights, no stage?"

She laughed up at me.

"You have forgotten that I met Ethan while he was on a vacation from his
work here, and roughing it. When I married him, I had hardly seen him in
anything except his Navy flannel shirt, scrubby trousers, and funny
blunt-toed shoes."

"You served in the war?" I asked him.

He nodded.

"Yes. On a submarine chaser. Got pneumonia from exposure and was
invalided home just before the Armistice."

"And you came back here?"

"I came here," he corrected me. "I enlisted from Maine. I was discharged
in New York. That was when I couldn't find anything I could do, until
this skating trick came along."

I sat thinking for a time; as long thoughts as I could command. The
obvious course was to send for Phillida's father. Yet what could that
vague and learned gentleman do that I could not? I visioned the
Professor standing in this riotous, gaudy restaurant, swinging his
eye-glasses by their silk ribbon and peering at Vere in helpless
distaste and consternation. It was practically certain that Phil would
refuse to go home with him.

What if she did go home? I could picture the scene there, when the truth
came out. The mortification of her people, the gossip in the little
town, her outcast position among the girls and boys with whom she had
grown up--what a martyrdom for a sensitive spirit! Of course, the only
possible thing considered by Aunt Caroline would be a prompt divorce.

If Phillida refused to consent to a divorce, how could she live at home
as the wife of a man her parents had pronounced unfit to receive? If she
yielded and gave up Vere, would she be much better off? An embarrassment
to her family, the heroine of a stolen marriage and Reno freedom, what
chance of happiness would she have in her conventional circle?
Especially as she neither was a beauty nor the dashing type of girl who
might make capital of such a reputation. Probably she would bury herself
in nunlike seclusion, stay in her room when callers came, and wear a
ve