She rose, drawing herself up to an arrogant height.  “I invite them for your sake,” she said, with slow emphasis.  “If you played your cards well you might get in right with Hilmer.  He’s a big man.”

“Yes,” he flung back, dryly, “and a damned insolent one, too.”

“He has his faults,” she defended.  “He’s not polished, but he’s forceful.”  She turned a malevolent smile upon her husband.  “When he told that drunken servant girl to go, she went!”

Starratt could feel the rush of blood dyeing his temples.  “That’s just in his line!” he sneered.  “He’s taken degrading orders, and so he knows how to give them...  He may have money now, but he hasn’t always been so fortunate.  I’ve been short of funds in my day, but I never fought with a dirk for a half loaf of bread...  You’ve heard the story of his life...  What has he got to make him proud?”

“Just that ... he’s pulled himself out of it.  While we...  Tell me, where are we?  Where will we be ten years from now?...  Twenty?  Why aren’t you doing something?...  Everybody else is.”

He folded his arms and leaned against the doorway.  “Perhaps I am,” he said, quietly.  “You don’t know everything.”

She made a movement toward him.  He stepped aside to let her pass.

“What can you do?” she taunted as she swept out of the room.

He stood for a moment dazed at the sudden and unexpected budding of her scorn.  He heard her slam the door of the bedroom.  He went over to the chair from which she had risen and dropped into it, shading his eyes.

The clock in the hallway was chiming two when the bedroom door opened again.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?” he heard his wife’s voice call with sharp irritation.

“No,” he answered.

CHAPTER III

It was extraordinary how wide awake Fred Starratt felt next morning.  He was full of tingling reactions to the sharp chill of disillusionment.  At the breakfast table he met his wife’s advances with an air of tolerant aloofness.  In the past, the first moves toward adjusting a misunderstanding had come usually from him.  He had an aptitude for kindling the fires of domestic harmony, but he had discovered overnight the futility of fanning a hearthstone blaze when the flue was choked so completely.  Before him lay the task of first correcting the draught.  Temporary genialities had no place in his sudden, bleak speculations.  Helen shirred his eggs to a turn, pressed the second cup of coffee on him, browned him a fresh slice of toast ... he suffered her favors, but he was unmoved by them.  They did not even annoy him.  When he kissed her good-by he felt the relaxation of her body against his, as she stood for a moment languishing in provocative surrender.  He put her aside sharply.  Her caress had a new quality which irritated him.