Afterward, when the dinner was over, Adrian would go home and awake his wife, Cecil, who, with the brutal honesty of an honest woman, also some of the ungenerosity, had early in her married life flatly refused any share in the ceremonies described.  Cecil would lie in her small white bed, the white of her boudoir-cap losing itself in the white of the pillow, a little sleepy and a little angrily perplexed at the perpetual jesuitical philosophy of the male.  “If you feel that way,” she would ask, “why do you go there, then?  Why don’t you banish your uncle utterly?” She asked this not without malice, her long, violet, Slavic eyes widely open, and her red mouth, a trifle too large, perhaps, a trifle cruel, fascinatingly interrogative over her white teeth.  She loved Adrian and had at times, therefore, the right and desire to torture him.  She knew perfectly well why he went.  He was his uncle’s heir, and until such time as money and other anachronisms of the present social system were done away with, there was no use throwing a fortune into the gutter, even if by your own efforts you were making an income just sufficiently large to keep up with the increased cost of living.

Sooner or later Adrian’s mind reverted to Mrs. Denby.  This was usually after he had been in bed and had been thinking for a while in the darkness.  He could not understand Mrs. Denby.  She affronted his modern habit of thought.

“The whole thing is so silly and adventitious!”

“What thing?”

Adrian was aware that his wife knew exactly of what he was talking, but he had come to expect the question.  “Mrs. Denby and my uncle.”  He would grow rather gently cross.  “It has always reminded me of those present-day sword-and-cloak romances fat business men used to write about ten years ago and sell so enormously—­there’s an atmosphere of unnecessary intrigue.  What’s it all about?  Here’s the point!  Why, if she felt this way about things, didn’t she divorce that gentle drunkard of a husband of hers years ago and marry my uncle outright and honestly?  Or why, if she couldn’t get a divorce—­which she could—­didn’t she leave her husband and go with my uncle?  Anything in the open!  Make a break—­have some courage of her opinions!  Smash things; build them up again!  Thank God nowadays, at least, we have come to believe in the cleanness of surgery rather than the concealing palliatives of medicine.  We’re no longer—­we modern people—­afraid of the world; and the world can never hurt for any length of time any one who will stand up to it and tell it courageously to go to hell.  No!  It comes back and licks hands.”

“I’ll tell you why.  My uncle and Mrs. Denby are the typical moral cowards of their generation.  There’s selfishness, too.  What a travesty of love!  Of course there’s scandal, a perpetual scandal; but it’s a hidden, sniggering scandal they don’t have to meet face to face; and that’s all they ask of life, they, and people like them—­never to have to meet