Adelaide thought of Charles Whitney listening to that same recital, and almost laughed.  “Well, I feel sure it will turn out all right,” she said.  “Your mother’ll see to that.  And I believe you’ll be very, very happy.”  Theatricals in private life was Janet’s passion—­why should she not be happy?  Frenchmen were famous for their politeness and consideration to their wives; Aristide would never let her see or feel that she bored him, that her reverence for the things he was too intelligent and modern not to despise appealed to him only through his sense of humor.  Janet would push her shrewd, soulful way into social leadership, would bring her children up to be more aristocratic than the children of the oldest aristocrats.

Adelaide smiled as she pictured it all—­smiled, yet sighed.  She was not under Janet’s fixed and unshakable delusions.  She saw that high-sounding titles were no more part of the personalities bearing them than the mass of frankly false hair so grandly worn by Aristide’s grand-aunt was part of the wisp-like remnant of natural head covering.  But that other self of hers, so reluctant to be laughed or frowned down and out by the self that was Hiram Ranger’s daughter, still forced her to share in the ancient, ignorant allegiance to “appearances.”  She did not appreciate how bored she was, how impatient to be back with Dory, the never monotonous, the always interesting, until she discovered that Janet, with her usual subtlety, had arranged for them to stay another week, had made it impossible for her to refuse without seeming to be disobliging and even downright rude.  They were to have returned to Paris on a Monday.  On Sunday she wrote Dory to telegraph for her on Tuesday.

“I’d hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery,” thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besancon drifted from her horizon—­she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthe women as chaperone.  “It is foolery and it is dull.  I don’t see how grown-up people endure it, unless they’ve never known any better.  Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for—­and Dory.”  She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go.  “Still,” she concluded, “I am learning”—­which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement.

Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might.  Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self—­the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her.  He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes;