He walked back to his place beside the mantel, and put his shoulders against it, and faced Van Bibber, with his fingers twisted in the cord around his waist.

“When I married,” said Mr. Caruthers, “I did so against the wishes of my people and the advice of all my friends.  You know all about that.  God help us! who doesn’t?” he added, bitterly.  “It was very rich, rare reading for you and for every one else who saw the daily papers, and we gave them all they wanted of it.  I took her out of that life and married her because I believed she was as good a woman as any of those who had never had to work for their living, and I was bound that my friends and your friends should recognize her and respect her as my wife had a right to be respected; and I took her abroad that I might give all you sensitive, fine people a chance to get used to the idea of being polite to a woman who had once been a burlesque actress.  It began over there in Paris.  What I went through then no one knows; but when I came back—­and I would never have come back if she had not made me—­it was my friends I had to consider, and not her.  It was in the blood; it was in the life she had led, and in the life men like you and me had taught her to live.  And it had to come out.”

The muscles of Mr. Caruthers’s face were moving, and beyond his control; but Van Bibber did not see this, for he was looking intently out of the window, over the roofs of the city.

“She had every chance when she married me that a woman ever had,” continued the older man.  “It only depended on herself.  I didn’t try to make a housewife of her or a drudge.  She had all the healthy excitement and all the money she wanted, and she had a home here ready for her whenever she was tired of travelling about and wished to settle down.  And I was—­and a husband that loved her as—­she had everything.  Everything that a man’s whole thought and love and money could bring to her.  And you know what she did.”

He looked at Van Bibber, but Van Bibber’s eyes were still turned towards the open window and the night.

“And after the divorce—­and she was free to go where she pleased, and to live as she pleased and with whom she pleased, without bringing disgrace on a husband who honestly loved her—­I swore to my God that I would never see her nor her child again.  And I never saw her again, not even when she died.  I loved the mother, and she deceived me and disgraced me and broke my heart, and I only wish she had killed me; and I was beginning to love her child, and I vowed she should not live to trick me too.  I had suffered as no man I know had suffered; in a way a boy like you cannot understand, and that no one can understand who has not gone to hell and been forced to live after it.  And was I to go through that again?  Was I to love and care for and worship this child, and have her grow up with all her mother’s vanity and animal nature, and have her turn on me some day and show me that what