nearly "off his chump"--the
expression was hers--as a human being could be without laying himself
open to arrest. After calling the taxi in Fifth Avenue he had walked
up and down, compelling her to walk by his side, for a good fifteen
minutes before making her get in and springing in beside her. At the
house opposite he had stared and stared, as if hoping that some one
would look out. During the drive to the place where they got the
license, and later to the minister's house, he spoke not a word. In
the restaurant to which he took her afterward, the most glorious place
she had ever been in, he ordered a feast suited to a queen, but she
could hardly do more than taste it. She felt that the waiter was
looking at them strangely, and she didn't know the uses of the knives
and forks. The man she had married offered her no help, neither
speaking to her nor giving her a glance. He himself ate but little,
lost in some mental maze to which she had no clue.

After dinner he had proposed the theatre, but she had refused. She
couldn't go anywhere else with him. Wherever they moved, a thousand
eyes were turned in amazement at the extraordinary pair. He saw
nothing, but she was alive to it all--more conscious of her hat and
suit than even in the street scene in "The Man with the Emerald Eye."
Once and for all she became aware that the first standard for human
valuation is in clothes.

In the end they had got into another taxi, to be driven round and
round the Park and out along the river bank, till he decided that they
might go home. During all this time he hardly noticed her. Once he
asked her if she was warm enough, and once if she would like to get
out and take a walk along the parapet above the river, but otherwise
he was withdrawn into a world which he kept shut and locked against
her. That left her alone. She had never felt so much alone in her
life, not even in the days which followed her mother's death. It was
as if she had been snatched away from everything with which she was
familiar, to find herself stranded in a country of fantastic dreams.

Then there was the house and the little back room. By the use of his
latchkey they had entered a palace huge and dark. Letty didn't know
that people lived with so much space around them. Only a hall light
burned in a many-colored oriental lamp, and in the half-gloom the
rooms on each side of the entry were cavernous. There was not a
servant, not a sound. The only living thing was