Harry did not seem to notice it.  He started up immediately.  The portieres between the room and the vestibule were drawn.  He had, in fact, felt somewhat chilly.  It was a cold day, and he had a touch of the grip.  “I will open the portieres, dear,” he said.  “I dare say you are right.”

“I noticed it when I first came in,” said Ida.  “I meant to draw the portieres apart myself, but going out through the library I forgot it.  Thank you, dear.  How is your cold?”

“It is nothing, dear,” replied Harry.  “There is only a little soreness in my throat.”

He resumed his seat, and noticed the fragrance of roasted chicken coming through the parted portieres from the kitchen.  Harry was very fond of roasted chicken.  He inhaled that and the delicate perfume of Ida’s garments and hair.  He regarded her glowing beauty with affection which had no taint of sensuality.  Harry had more of a poetic liking for sweet odors and beauty than a sensual one.

Harry Edgham in these days had a more poetic and spiritual look than formerly.  He had not lost his strange youthfulness of expression; it was as if a child had the appearance of having been longer on the earth.  His hair had thinned, and receded from his temples, and the bold, almost babyish fulness of his temples was more evident.  His face was thinner, too, and he had not much color.  His mouth was drawn down at the corner, and he frowned slightly, as a child might, in helpless but non-aggressive dissent.  His worn appearance was very noticeable, in spite of his present happy mood, of which his wife shrewdly took advantage.

Ida Edgham did not care for books, although she never admitted that fact, but she could read with her cold feminine astuteness the moods and souls of men, with unerring quickness.  Those last were to her advantage or disadvantage, and in anything of that nature she was gifted by nature.  Ida Edgham might have been, as her husband might have been, a poet, an adventuress, who could have made the success of her age had she not been hindered, as well as aided, by her self-love.  She had the shrewdness which prognosticates as well as discerns, and saw the inevitableness of the ultimatum of all irregularities in a world which, however irregular it is in practice, still holds regularity as its model of conduct and progression.  Ida Edgham would, in the desperate state of the earth before the flood, have made herself famous.  As it was, her irregular talents had a limited field; however, she did all she could.  It always seemed to her that, as far as the right and wrong of things went, her own happiness was eminently right, and that it was distinctly wrong for her, or any one else, to oppose any obstacle to it.  She allowed the pleasant influences of the passing moment to have their full effect upon her husband, and she continued her leading up to the subject by those easy and apparently unrelated sequences which none but a diplomat could have managed.