When a rather tired and preoccupied man takes his wife of four years’ standing out to dinner he knows that he need not exert himself to talk, to shine, to please, as with a woman who holds the piquancy of a stranger; so while Osborn spoke spasmodically, or drifted into silence, Marie could look around her and think thoughts which chilled the ardour of her soul.  It seemed to her, that evening of her twenty-ninth birthday, that a door was opened to her, revealing nakedly the fears and the trepidations and the minute cares of marriage which have creased many a woman’s brow before her time.  The restaurant was to her the tide of life, upon which the black-haired woman and her sisters sailed victoriously, but upon which she, and wives like her, trained for the race only in the backwaters of their homes, embarked timidly to their disgrace and peril.  What wife of a husband with two hundred a year could row against the black-haired woman and keep pride of place?

As Marie wondered things which all her sisterhood have long ached over, she saw Osborn looking at the black-haired woman too, and in his eyes there was a light of admiration, a keenness, a speculation which drew the tired lines from his face and left it eager once more.  It was the male look which once he had looked only for her.  With a heart beating sharply she recognised and wanted it again, but she felt strangely impotent.  She in her dyed gown, her gamin of a hat, with her spoiled hands and thin cheeks—­and that tall, rounded beauty with all her life and vivacity, undrained, throbbing in her from toes to finger-tips!  What a comparison!

Vain and profitless was the unequal competition.  She felt one moment as if, should it come to a struggle, she would relinquish it in sheer despair; the next, as if she would fight, teeth and nails, body and brains, for her inalienable rights over this man.  All the while these emotions surged up in her, and ebbed and flowed in again, her intelligence told her the wild absurdity of such supposition.  The raven woman was a stranger; and socially, to all appearance, she must always remain so.  Yet Marie could not still the passionate unrest of her heart without taking her husband’s eyes from the table where two obsequious men adored a goddess.

She drummed her hard finger-tips sharply on the table.

“Osborn, do you know her?”

“Know her?  No.”  He added carelessly:  “I wish I did.”

Marie said in a voice which she tried hard to keep detached:  “Why?  Oh, yes....  I—­I suppose she’s the type men would admire very much.”

“Well, you were admiring her a few minutes ago.”

“In—­in a way I was.  I mean, she’s so smooth, so—­so well-kept, and her frock is lovely, with those diamond shoulder-straps and all that black tulle.  I thought—­you stared as if you knew her.”

“I hope I shouldn’t stare at any woman because I knew her.  As a matter of fact, I believe I know who she is; she’s an actress; bound to succeed if she takes the right line, I should think.  Just now she’s got six lines to speak in that new piece of Mutro’s.  You know—­what’s it called?”