Mrs. Boyer, shown over the flat by Stewart during Marie’s temporary exile in the apartment across the hall, was captivated by the comfort of the little suite and by its order.  Her housewifely mind, restless with long inactivity in a pension, seized on the bright pans of Marie’s kitchen and the promise of the brick-and-sheetiron stove.  She disapproved of Stewart, having heard strange stories of him, but there was nothing bacchanal or suspicious about this orderly establishment.  Mrs. Boyer was a placid, motherly looking woman, torn from her church and her card club, her grown children, her household gods of thirty years’ accumulation, that “Frank” might catch up with his profession.

She had explained it rather tremulously at home.

“Father wants to go,” she said.  “You children are big enough now to be left.  He’s always wanted to do it, but we couldn’t go while you were little.”

“But, mother!” expostulated the oldest girl.  “When you are so afraid of the ocean!  And a year!”

“What is to be will be,” she had replied.  “If I’m going to be drowned I’ll be drowned, whether it’s in the sea or in a bathtub.  And I’ll not let father go alone.”

Fatalism being their mother’s last argument and always final, the children gave up.  They let her go.  More, they prepared for her so elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to purchase anything abroad.  She had gone through Paris looking straight ahead lest her eyes lead her into the temptation of the shops.  In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit with determination, vaguely conscious that the women about her had more style, were different.  She priced unsuitable garments wistfully, and went home to her trunks full of best materials that would never wear out.  The children, knowing her, had bought the best.

To this couple, then, Stewart had rented his apartment.  It is hard to say by what psychology he found their respectability so satisfactory.  It was as though his own status gained by it.  He had much the same feeling about the order and decency with which Marie managed the apartment, as if irregularity were thus regularized.

Marie had met him once for a walk along the Graben.  She had worn an experimental touch of rouge under a veil, and fine lines were drawn under her blue eyes, darkening them.  She had looked very pretty, rather frightened.  Stewart had sent her home and had sulked for an entire evening.

So curious a thing is the mind masculine, such an order of disorder, so conventional its defiance of convention.  Stewart breaking the law and trying to keep the letter!

On the day they left for Semmering Marie was up at dawn.  There was much to do.  The house must be left clean and shining.  There must be no feminine gewgaws to reveal to the Frau Doktor that it was not a purely masculine establishment.  At the last moment, so late that it sent her heart into her mouth, she happened on the box of rouge hidden from Stewart’s watchful eyes.  She gave it to the milk girl.