When her hair was arranged in the simple way she had always worn it, she slipped her dress over her bare shoulders, and fastened it slowly—­for Miss Polly had no patience with “back fastenings”—­while she told herself again that George would not be satisfied.  She knew that her gown was provincial, knew that she lacked the “dash” he admired in women; and from the first she had been mystified by a love which could, while still passionately desiring her, wish her different in so many ways.  “I’d like him to be proud of me, but I suppose he never will be,” she thought dejectedly, “and yet he fell in love with me just as I was, and he did not fall in love with any of the dashing women he knows,” she added quickly, consoled by the reflection.  “And of course in a few things I wish him different, too.  I wish he wasn’t so careless.  He is so careless that I shall have to be twice as careful, I shall have to look after him all the time.  Even to-night he has forgotten about the dinner, and he’ll be obliged to dress in a hurry, which he hates.”

Glancing at the clock again, she saw that it was a quarter of eight, and still George had not come.

CHAPTER VI

THE OLD SERPENT

At five minutes of eight o’clock he came in, with a lighted cigar in his mouth.  For the first few days after her marriage there had been a pleasant excitement in the scent of George’s cigars in her bedroom.  Now, however, habit had dulled the excitement, and the smell of tobacco gave her a headache.

“Oh, George, you are late!” she exclaimed, sinking the lesser into the greater offence after the habit of wives.  As if he had all night instead of five minutes before him in which to dress, he stood in the centre of the room, blandly looking her over.

“You’re all right,” he said after a pause.  “I met a fellow at the club I hadn’t seen for a year.  He had been hunting big game in Africa, and he was telling me about it.  By Jove, that is life!”

They had been married but a month; it was their first day at home, and he could linger at the club to talk of big game while she waited for him.  Flushed, excited, he stood there on the white bearskin rug midway between the bed and the wood-fire, while she felt his charm stealing like a drug over her senses.  Though she had begun to realize the thinness of his mental qualities, she was still as completely in the power of his physical charm as she had been on the day of her wedding.  In the flickering light of the fire he appeared to diffuse the glamour of romance, of adventure; and she felt that this single day in New York had left a vital impression upon him.  It was as if he had become suddenly more alive, more inexplicable in his simplicity; and, though she had grasped vaguely the fact that his personality was composed of innumerable reactions, she had never really understood before how entirely he was the creature of his environment.  It was as if the very essence of his soul floated there, a variable and fluid quantity, forever changing form and colour beneath the shallow ripples of his personality.  She had seen him in many moods, but never in this one.  Did he possess a deeper subtlety than she had imagined or was it the sincerity of his nature that defied analysis?