Still, it heartened him to hope that their friendship—­since it was to be no more—­might prove a survival, or rather a veritable renaissance, of the beautiful old Greek spirit in such matters.  And, though the blind chance that mismanaged the world had chained them to uncongenial, though certainly well-meaning, persons, this was no logical reason why he and Patricia should be deprived of the pleasures of intellectual intercourse.  Their souls were too closely akin.

For Mr. Charteris admitted that his soul was Grecian to the core, and out of place and puzzled and very lonely in a sordid, bustling world; and he assured Patricia—­she did not object if he called her Patricia?—­that her own soul possessed all the beauty and purity and calm of an Aphrodite sculptured by Phidias.  It was such a soul as Horace might have loved, as Theocritus might have hymned in glad Greek song.  Patricia flushed, and dissented somewhat.

“Frankly, mon ami,” she said, “you are far too attractive for your company to be quite safe.  You are such an adept in the nameless little attentions that women love—­so profuse with lesser sugar-plums of speech and action—­that after two weeks one’s husband is really necessary as an antidote.  Sugar-plums are good, but, like all palatable things, unwholesome.  So I shall prescribe Rudolph’s company for myself, to ward off an attack of moral indigestion.  I am very glad he has come back—­really glad,” she added, conscientiously.  “Poor old Rudolph! what between his interminable antiquities and those demented sections of the alphabet—­What are those things, mon ami, that are always going up and down in Wall Street?”

“Elevators?” Mr. Charteris suggested.

“Oh, you jay-bird!  I mean those N.P.’s and N.Y.C.’s and those other letters that are always having flurries and panics and passed dividends.  They keep him incredibly busy.”

And she sighed, tolerantly.  Patricia had come within the last two weeks to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking likewise.  Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a pleasant, sun-flecked gloom about them.

Patricia removed her hat—­the morning really was rather close—­and paused where a sunbeam fell upon her copper-colored hair, and glorified her wistful countenance.  She sighed once more, and added a finishing touch to the portrait of a femme incomprise.

“Pray, don’t think, mon ami,” she said very earnestly, “that I am blaming Rudolph!  I suppose no wife can ever hope to have any part in her husband’s inner life.”

“Not in her own husband’s, of course,” said Charteris, cryptically.

“No, for while a woman gives her heart all at once, men crumble theirs away, as one feeds bread to birds—­a crumb to this woman, a crumb to that—­and such a little crumb, sometimes!  And his wife gets what is left over.”