chance misses bowing and smiling to any woman who might be
passing. His wife, dressed stiffly and smartly, is looking straight
ahead, with as weary a face as that of the Hungarian Spitz beside her.
Time, in the Temple of Love on the hill has not worn her bloom off; it
is all there--and more; but the additional bloom, the artificial bloom,
is visible. When she smiles, as she sometimes smiles at the men friends
of the Judge who greet the pair, it is an elaborately mechanical smile,
with a distinct beginning, climax, and ending. Some way it fails to
convince one that she has any pleasure in it. The smile still is
beautiful, exceedingly beautiful--but only as a picture. When the smile
is garnished with words the voice is low and musical--but too low and
too obviously musical. It does not reveal the soul of Margaret Van
Dorn--the soul that glowed in the girl who came to Prospect Township
fifteen years before, with banners flying to lay siege to Harvey. The
soul that glowed through those wonderful eyes upon Henry Fenn--where is
it? She has not been crossed in any desire of her life. She has enjoyed
every form of pleasure that money could buy for her; she is delving into
books that make the wrinkles come between her eyebrows, and is rubbing
the wrinkles out and the ideas from the books as fast as they come. She
is droning a formula for happiness, learned of the books that make her
head ache, and is repeating over and over, "God is good, and I am God,"
as one who would plaster truth upon his consciousness by the mere
repetition of it. But the truth does not help her. So she sits beside
her husband, a wax work figure of a woman, and he seems to treat her as
a wax figure. For he is clearly occupied with his own affairs.

When he is not bowing and smiling, a sneer is on his face. And when he
speaks to the horse his voice is harsh and mean. He holds an unlighted
cigar in his mouth as a terrier might hold a loathed rat; working the
muscles of his lips at times viciously but saying nothing. The soft,
black hat of his youthful days is replaced by a high, stiff, squarely
sawed felt hat which he imagines gives him great dignity. His clothes
have become so painfully scrupulous in their exact conformation to the
mode that he looks wooden. He has given so much thought to the subject
of "wherewithal shall ye be clothed," that the thought in some queer
spiritual curdling has appeared in the unyielding texture of his
artificial tailored skin,