Lucia determined that this broken affair should not wreck her existence.  But she brooded long, in secret, and would go nowhere.  Her aunt, with whom she lived, could not rouse her for many months to a sense of the vivid world around her.  She would see no one.

Two years later Morgan Pell came into her life, at almost the first dinner she had attended during a long period of time.  His impulsiveness, his assurance, his faith in himself and his power to win her, swept her temporarily off her feet.  At their second meeting he asked her to become his wife.  Why not?  She would never love anyone; but she could not go to the altar with him unless she told him the truth.  She did not love him.  Was he willing to take her, knowing this?

He was.  Love meant little to him—­though he did not say so.  He was just wise enough to keep that secret within himself.

“I’ll make you love me,” he told her, with all the ardor he could put into his voice.  Few women can withstand that age-old phrase.

There followed a time of utter disillusion for her.  The great house on the Avenue proved to be but four bleak walls; and when the villa on Long Island was built, she tried to be as enthusiastic as Morgan wanted her to be.  He lavished gifts upon her.  He brought out gay house-parties for weekends.  Lucia did her best to keep her part of a bad bargain.  She made herself lovely, and Pell was proud of her physical charms.  The jewel was worth the finest settings, and these he supplied, with no thought of the cost.  He had someone at the head of his table of whom he was very proud.  The world need never know the solemnity of their lives when the curtain was lowered and they were alone together.  After all, many marriages were like this.  Theirs was by no means an exceptional case; and he experienced a curious secret joy in the fact that he knew other men envied him his wife, and wondered at his power to hold her.

And so the months rolled by, with a trip abroad now and then to relieve the tedium of existence.  For a woman to know that she comes to be tolerated only because she is decorative, is a consummating blow.  Pell soon reached the point where he told Lucia he had bought her, body and soul.  He had determined to win her love.  When he saw that he could not, he swiftly forgot the integrity of her part of the bargain, the honesty of her words to him before they were married; and he practised subtle cruelties to tame her and bring her at last to him.

He began to drink too much.  Only a certain pride in his business affairs, the desire to keep a level head, a clear brain, kept him from sinking definitely to the gutter.  He became irritable with her.  Nothing she did pleased him.  He found he could not wound her sufficiently when he was sober; so he fortified himself with alcohol, gained courage to speak flat truths, and left her alone for days at a time, thinking such absences were a punishment.