Adelaide got up and went to the window and looked out toward the Palisades.  Marty Burke had been a symbol that enabled her to recall some of her former attitudes of mind.  She remembered that dinner where she had pitted him against her husband.  She felt deeply humiliated in her own sight and in Vincent’s, for she was now ready to believe that he had read her mind from the beginning.  It seemed to her as if she had been mad, and in that madness had thrown away the only thing in the world she would ever value.  The thought of acknowledging her fault was not repugnant to her; she had no special objection to groveling, but she knew it would do no good.  Vincent, though not ungenerous, saw clearly; and he had summed up the situation in that terrible phrase about choosing between loving and being loved.  “I suppose I shouldn’t respect him much if he did forgive me,” she thought; and suddenly she felt his arms about her; he snatched her to him, turned her face to his, calling her by strange, unpremeditated terms of endearment.  Beyond these, no words at all were exchanged between them; they were undesired.  Adelaide did not know whether it were servile or superb to care little about knowing his opinion and intentions in regard to her.  All that she cared about was that in her eyes he was once more supreme and that his arms were about her.  Words, she knew, would have been her enemies, and she did not make use of them.

When they went out, they passed Wayne in the outer office.

“Come to dinner to-night, Pete,” said Farron, and added, turning to his wife, “That’s all right, isn’t it, Adelaide?”

She indicated that it was perfect, like everything he did.

Wayne looked at his future mother-in-law in surprise.  His pride had been unforgetably stung by some of her sentences, but he could have forgiven those more easily than the easy smile with which she now nodded at her husband’s invitation, as if a pleasant intention on her part could wipe out everything that had gone before.  That, it seemed to him, was the very essence of insolence.

Appreciating that some sort of doubt was disturbing him, Adelaide said most graciously: 

“Yes, you really must come, Mr. Wayne.”

At this moment Farron’s own stenographer, Chandler, approached him with an unsigned letter in his hand.

Chandler took the routine of the office more seriously than Farron did, and acquired thereby a certain power over his employer.  He had something of the attitude of a child’s nurse, who, knowing that her charge has almost passed beyond her care, recognizes that she has no authority except that bestowed by devotion.

“I think you meant to sign this letter, Mr. Farron,” he said, just as a nurse might say before strangers, “You weren’t going to the party without washing your hands?”

“Oh.”  Farron fished in his waistcoat for his pen, and while he was writing, and Chandler just keeping an eye on him to see that it was done right, Adelaide said: