“You are right, Dory,” said she.  “And I shall give up the house.  I’ll go to see Mrs. Dorsey now.”

“The house?—­What—­Oh, yes—­well—­no—­What made you change?”

She did not know the real reason—­that, studying his face, the curve and set of his head, the strength of the personality which she was too apt to take for granted most of the time because he was simple and free from pretense, she had been reminded that he was not a man to be trifled with, that she would better bestir herself and give more thought and attention to what was going on in that superbly shaped head of his—­about her, about her and him.  “Oh, I don’t just know,” replied she, quite honestly.  “It seems to me now that there’ll be too much fuss and care and—­sham.  And I intend to interest myself in your work.  You’ve hardly spoken of it since I got back.”

“There’s been so little time—­”

“You mean,” she interrupted, “I’ve been so busy unpacking my silly dresses and hats and making and receiving silly calls.”

“Now you’re in one of your penitential moods,” laughed Dory.  “And to-morrow you’ll wish you hadn’t changed about the house.  No—­that’s settled.  We’ll take it, and see what the consequences are.”

Adelaide brightened.  His tone was his old self, and she did want that house so intensely!  “I can be useful to Dory there; I can do so much on the social side of the university life.  He doesn’t appreciate the value of those things in advancing a career.  He thinks a career is made by work only.  But I’ll show him!  I’ll make his house the center of the university!”

Mrs. Dorsey had “Villa d’Orsay” carved on the stone pillars of her great wrought-iron gates, to remind the populace that, while her late father-in-law, “Buck” Dorsey, was the plainest of butchers and meat packers, his ancestry was of the proudest.  With the rise of its “upper class” Saint X had gone in diligently for genealogy, had developed reverence for “tradition” and “blood,” had established a Society of Family Histories, a chapter of the Colonial Dames, another of Daughters of the Revolution, and was in a fair way to rival the seaboard cities in devotion to the imported follies and frauds of “family.”  Dory at first indulged his sense of humor upon their Dorsey or d’Orsay finery.  It seemed to him they must choose between making a joke of it and having it make a joke of them.  But he desisted when he saw that it grated on Del for him to speak of her and himself as “caretakers for the rich.”  And presently his disposition to levity died of itself.  It sobered and disheartened and, yes, disgusted him as he was forced to admit to himself the reality of her delight in receiving people in the great drawing room, of her content in the vacuous, time-wasting habits, of her sense of superiority through having at her command a troop of servants—­Mrs. Dorsey’s servants!  He himself disliked servants about, hated to abet a fellow-being in looking on