“Perhaps I was unjust,” she remarked presently, “but one is never proof against intuitive impressions, and after all it does not greatly matter.”

Then she looked at Roger Adams as he walked in the electric light beside her.  She saw how haggard were the lines in his face, that he was bent in the shoulders as if from some mental burden, and the delicacy of his long, slender figure appeared to her almost as a physical infirmity.  It occurred to her at the instant that his bodily defects had never before showed so plainly to her eyes, and it was with a flash of acute self-consciousness—­a flash as from a lantern that has been turned inward—­that she realised that she was comparing him with Arnold Kemper.

CHAPTER X

SHOWS THE HERO TO BE LACKING IN HEROIC QUALITIES

When he had parted from Laura Adams walked down Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fifth Street and then turned east in the direction of his own house.  He found upon entering that Connie, as usual, was dining out, and after he had eaten his poorly served dinner alone in the dining-room, he went upstairs with the intention of slipping into his smoking jacket and returning to his study for a peaceful smoke.  The electric lights were blazing in Connie’s bedroom, and when he went in to extinguish them, moved by some instinct of economy, he found that the room was in even greater disorder than that to which he had grown, after years of uncomplaining discomfort, outwardly if not inwardly resigned.  Of a naturally systematic habit of thought, Connie’s carelessness had been for him one of those petty annoyances of daily life to meet which he had always felt that philosophy had been especially designed; but to-night the chaos struck him so forcibly that he found himself vaguely questioning if it were possible for a human creature to sleep in such a spot?  Picking up several gowns from the middle of the floor, he returned them to the wardrobe, and set himself to clearing the bed of an array of satin shoes.  Her silver hair brushes had fallen on the hearth rug, and in replacing them upon the bureau his eye fell on a small, half-empty phial lying beneath a pile of lace-edged handkerchiefs.  Looking at it a little closer he found that it contained a solution of cocaine.

For a moment surprise held him motionless; then as if to refute and explain away any ordinary reason for her possession of the drug, he remembered, in a comprehensive flash the recent violent changes in her character—­her uncontrollable attacks of nervousness, her spasmodic movements and her sudden flowing, almost hysterical, volubility of speech.  His heart contracted with a sensation like that of terror, and he was turning away again when his glance was arrested by a heap of crumpled bills lying loosely in one corner of the open drawer.  Recollecting that she had complained the day before of the smallness of her allowance, he drew out the papers for a casual