“We could cable Mrs. Dorsey,” she suggested lamely.  She was at the Louis Quinze desk in the Louis Quinze sitting room, and her old gold negligee matched in charmingly, and the whole setting brought out the sheen, faintly golden, over her clear skin, the peculiarly fresh and intense shade of her violet eyes, the suggestion of gold in her thick hair, with its wan, autumnal coloring, such as one sees in a field of dead ripe grain.  She was doing her monthly accounts, and the showing was not pleasant.  She was a good housekeeper, a surprisingly good manager; but she did too much entertaining for their income.

Dory was too much occupied with the picture she made as she sat there to reply immediately.  “I doubt,” he finally replied, “if she could arrange by cable for some one else whom she would trust with her treasures.  No, I guess you’ll have to stay.”

“I wish I hadn’t taken this place!” she exclaimed.  It was the first confession of what her real, her sane and intelligent self had been proclaiming loudly since the first flush of interest and pleasure in her “borrowed plumage” had receded.  “Why do you let me make a fool of myself?”

“No use going into that,” replied he, on guard not to take too seriously this belated penitence.  He was used to Del’s fits of remorse, so used to them that he thought them less valuable than they really were, or might have been had he understood her better—­or, not bothered about trying to understand her.  “I shan’t be away long, I imagine,” he went on, “and I’ll have to rush round from England to France, to Germany, to Austria, to Switzerland.  All that would be exhausting for you, and only a little of the time pleasant.”

His words sounded to her like a tolling over the grave of that former friendship and comradeship of theirs.  “I really believe you’ll be glad to get away alone,” cried she, lips smiling raillery, eyes full of tears.

“Do you think so?” said Dory, as if tossing back her jest.  But both knew the truth, and each knew that the other knew it.  He was as glad to escape from those surroundings as she to be relieved of a presence which edged on her other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her.  It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d’Orsay.  His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens.  And in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with blaming him for her low spirits; in fact, they were wholly the result of her consciously unworthy mode of life, and of an incessant internal warfare, exhausting and depressing.  Also, the day would surely come when he would ask how she was contriving to keep up such imposing appearances on their eighteen hundred a year; and then she would have to choose between directly deceiving him and telling him that she had broken—­no, not broken, that was too harsh—­rather, had not yet fulfilled the promise to give up the income her father left her.