At luncheon Gerty appeared, wearing a startling French gown, which, she said, had just arrived that morning.  After the first casual greeting they fell into an animated discussion of the choice of veils, during which Gerty declared that Laura had never selected the particular spots which would be most becoming to her features.  “You get them too large and too far apart,” she insisted, picking up a black net veil from a pile on Laura’s table, “even I with my silly nose can’t stand this kind.”

Laura’s eyes were fixed upon her with their singular intensity of look, but in spite of the absorption of her gaze, she had not heard a single word that Gerty uttered.

“Yes, yes, you’re right,” she said; but instead of thinking of the veils, she was wondering all the time if Gerty had really forgotten her jealousy of Madame Alta and the letter she had burned.

“I shall tell him this afternoon and that will make everything easy,” she thought; and when, after a little frivolous conversation Gerty had remembered an engagement and driven hurriedly away, the situation appeared to Laura to have become perfectly smooth again.  At the announcement of Kemper’s name, she crossed the room to meet him with this impulse still struggling for expression.  “I shall tell him now, and then everything will be made easy,” she repeated.

But when she opened her lips to speak, she found that the confession would not come into words, and what she really said was: 

“It has been a century since yesterday, for I’ve done nothing but shop.”

Laughing he caught her hands, and she saw with her first glance, that he was in one of his ironic moods.

“I thought I’d netted a wren,” he answered, “but it seems I’ve caught a bird of Paradise.”

“Then it was your ignorance of natural history, and not I, that deceived you,” she retorted gayly, “because I didn’t spread my wings for you, did you imagine that they were not brilliant?”

There was a note almost of relief in her voice as she spoke—­for she knew now that, so long as he refused to be serious, she could not tell him until to-morrow.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH LAURA ENTERS THE VALLEY OF HUMILIATION

Two weeks later Laura was still able to assure herself that it was this lack of “seriousness” in Kemper’s manner which had kept her from alluding to the burned letter.  Since the morning on which she had seen Adams, she felt that she had merely skimmed experience without actually touching it; and three days from the date of her marriage she was as far from any deeper understanding of the situation as she had been in the beginning of her love.  In the end it was so much easier to ignore her difficulties than to face them; and it seemed to her now that she was forced almost in spite of herself into Gerty’s frivolous attitude toward life.  To evade the real—­to crowd one’s existence with little lies until there was no space left through which the larger truth might enter—­this was the only solution which she had found ready for her immediate need.