thes, his fixed habits of work, the manifold
creature comforts that he prized--all the associations of his life with
home--came to him a thousand, thousand times and cut little knife-edged
rents in the fabric of his new freedom.

And he would have said a year before that it was physically impossible
for one child--one small, fair-haired child of five, with pleading face
and eager eyes--to meet a man so often in a given period of time, as
Lila met him. At first he had avoided her; he would duck into stores;
hurry up stairways, or hide himself in groups of men on the sidewalk
when he saw her coming. Then there came a time when he knew that the
little figure was slipping across the street to avoid him because his
presence shamed her with her playmates.

He had never in his heart believed that the child meant much to him. She
was merely part of the chain that held him, and yet now that she was not
of him or his interests, it seemed to Thomas Van Dorn that she made a
piteous figure upon the street, and that the sadness that flitted over
her face when she saw him, in some way reproached him, and yet--what
right had she in him--or why should he let her annoy him, or disturb his
peace and the happiness that his freedom brought. Materially he noticed
that she was well fed, well dressed, and he knew that she was well
housed. What more could she have--but that was absurd. He couldn't wreck
his life for the mere chance that a child should be petted a little.
There was no sense in such a proposition. And Thomas Van Dorn's life was
regulated by sense--common sense--horse sense, he called it.

It is curious--and scores of Tom Van Dorn's friends wondered at it then
and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed
between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the
shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them.
Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what
you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good
intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the
uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him,
sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade--a glow that brought out
hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity
and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal.
He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted
her in thought w