As he came in she went over to the table and began making tea with nervous hands.  She was apparently in the highest spirits, and while she fumbled noisily with the cups and saucers she rambled on in her expressionless voice with tinkling interludes of her shrill, falsetto laughter.  As he watched her in shamed silence he remembered with astonishment that it had taken him almost ten years to find out that Connie was vulgar.  Now at last his eyes were opened—­he had achieved a standard of comparison and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct, quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she been presented to him in the form of a printed page.  The sense of remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised the uselessness of his good intentions toward her—­the utter impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of temperament.

Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; “and I shan’t be here to dine, either,” she added, as an after thought.  “Gus Brady will come for me—­there’s the opera and a supper afterwards, so you needn’t trouble to sit up.”

“But whom are you going with?” he enquired, filled for the first time with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie moved.

She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green.  “Oh, you wouldn’t know if I told you,” she answered impatiently, and left the room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the repeated question.  What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he slowly sipped his coffee.  Even if she should go with Brady alone, where was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission.  He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought.  Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the moment from his thoughts.  But the very secretiveness of her manner—­the suggestion of a hidden motive which dwelt in her nervous movements and even quivered in the little scintillating aigrette on her blonde head—­aroused in him if not a positive distrust, still a bewildering and decidedly unpleasant confusion of ideas.  He felt, somehow, vaguely impelled to action, yet for the life of him, he admitted after a moment, he could see no single direction in which action with regard to his wife would not savor of the indiscreet, if not of the ridiculous.  The attitude of an aggrieved husband had always showed