sometimes I think he couldn’t care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for.”  Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, “Oh, yes, he does care!  And without his love how wretched I’d be!  What a greedy I am—­wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return.”  That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the “Woman’s Paradise,” otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.

And she was lonely without him.  If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them.  Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology.  But he did not come; and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing that was begins to be as if it had not been.

He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly, eager for the chance to burst forth.  And he had roused it when he would not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself.

As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del began to see much of Henrietta Hastings.  Grandfather Fuller was now dead and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs.  Henrietta’s income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress.  But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known.  Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech.  Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had the habit of saying that “If Hastings had some of his wife’s ‘get up’ he wouldn’t be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for himself.”  In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be.  She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband.  All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday’s forgotten or disdained.