But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she accepted the situation.  She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked.  If there were times when she wearied him, there were others when he sickened her.  Across from her at the table he ate slowly and enormously.  He splashed her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping cold baths.  He flung his soiled clothing anywhere.  He drank whisky at night and crawled into the lavender-scented sheets redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and snore until she wanted to scream.  But she played the game to the limit of her ability.

Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant effort, and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet him half way.  They played two-handed card games.  He read aloud to her, poetry which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he hated.  He suggested country walks and she agreed, to limp back after a half mile or so in her high-heeled pumps.

He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of unnumbered blank evenings.  He had formerly taken an occasional evening at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina’s eyes would fill with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again.  And in his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.

He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there were times when he knew he lied to himself.  One fiction, however, he persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly.  It was only that she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home, companionship and quiet intelligent talk.  She had been restful.  Nina was never restful.

He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train.  “The Valley” had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run.  The reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it.  But he never carried the paper home.

He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York.  He would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph.  There were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of the excursion by some manipulation of business interests.  For months, however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.

But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going, and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with Elizabeth’s life through Judson Clark.  The discovery, communicated to him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally different feeling from Nina’s.  He saw no glamour of great wealth.  On the contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman who had not deserved it.  And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy, surmised even that.