Soon afterward, the birth of the boy seemed to wipe out these humiliating memories; yet Marvell found in time that they were not effaced, but only momentarily crowded out of sight.  In reality, the incident had a meaning out of proportion to its apparent seriousness, for it put in his hand a clue to a new side of his wife’s character.  He no longer minded her having lied about the jeweller; what pained him was that she had been unconscious of the wound she inflicted in destroying the identity of the jewels.  He saw that, even after their explanation, she still supposed he was angry only because she had deceived him; and the discovery that she was completely unconscious of states of feeling on which so much of his inner life depended marked a new stage in their relation.  He was not thinking of all this as he sat beside Clare Van Degen; but it was part of the chronic disquietude which made him more alive to his cousin’s sympathy, her shy unspoken understanding.  After all, he and she were of the same blood and had the same traditions.  She was light and frivolous, without strength of will or depth of purpose; but she had the frankness of her foibles, and she would never have lied to him or traded on his tenderness.

Clare’s nervousness gradually subsided, and she lapsed into a low-voiced mood which seemed like an answer to his secret thought.  But she did not sound the personal note, and they chatted quietly of commonplace things:  of the dinner-dance at which they were presently to meet, of the costume she had chosen for the Driscoll fancy-ball, the recurring rumours of old Driscoll’s financial embarrassment, and the mysterious personality of Elmer Moffatt, on whose movements Wall Street was beginning to fix a fascinated eye.  When Ralph, the year after his marriage, had renounced his profession to go into partnership with a firm of real-estate agents, he had come in contact for the first time with the drama of “business,” and whenever he could turn his attention from his own tasks he found a certain interest in watching the fierce interplay of its forces.  In the down-town world he had heard things of Moffatt that seemed to single him out from the common herd of money-makers:  anecdotes of his coolness, his lazy good-temper, the humorous detachment he preserved in the heat of conflicting interests; and his figure was enlarged by the mystery that hung about it—­the fact that no one seemed to know whence he came, or how he had acquired the information which, for the moment, was making him so formidable.  “I should like to see him,” Ralph said; “he must be a good specimen of the one of the few picturesque types we’ve got.”

“Yes—­it might be amusing to fish him out; but the most picturesque types in Wall Street are generally the tamest in a drawing-room.”  Clare considered.  “But doesn’t Undine know him?  I seem to remember seeing them together.”

“Undine and Moffatt?  Then you know him—­you’ve’ met him?”