“Would you blame her?” Doris asked casually.

“Bless your soul, no,” Lawanne laughed.  “If I were a little more romantic, I might run away with her myself.  What a tremendous jar that would give Bland’s exasperating complacency.  I believe he’s a hang-over from that prehistoric time when men didn’t believe that any woman had a soul—­that a woman was something in which a man acquired a definite property right merely by marrying her.”

Doris chuckled.

“I can imagine how Mr. Bland would look if he heard you,” she said.

“He’d only smile in a superior manner,” Lawanne declared.  “You couldn’t get Bland fussed up by any mere assertion.  The only thing that would stir him deeply would be a direct assault on that vague abstraction which he calls his honor—­or on his property.  Then he would very likely smite the wrongdoer with all the efficiency of outraged virtue.”

Hollister continued to muse on this after Lawanne went away.  He thought Lawanne’s summing up a trifle severe.  Nevertheless it was a pretty clear statement of fact.  Bland certainly seemed above working either for money or to secure a reasonable degree of comfort for himself and his wife.  He sat waiting for a windfall to restore his past splendor of existence, which he sometimes indirectly admitted meant cricket, a country home, horses and dogs, a whirl among the right sort of people in London now and then.  That sort of thing and that sort of man was what Myra had fallen in love with.  Hollister felt a mild touch of contempt for them both.

His wife had also let her thoughts focus on the Blands.

“I wonder,” she said, “if they are so very poor?  Why don’t you offer Bland a job?  Maybe he is too proud to ask.”

Bland was not too proud to ask for certain things, it seemed.  About a week later he came to Hollister and in a most casual manner said, “I say, old man, can you let me have a hundred dollars?  My quarterly funds are delayed a bit.”

Hollister gave him the money without question.  As he watched Bland stride away through the light blanket of snow, and a little later noticed him disappear among the thickets and stumps going towards the Carr camp, where supplies were sold as a matter of accommodation rather than for profit, Hollister reflected that there was a mild sort of irony in the transaction.  He wondered if Myra knew of her husband’s borrowing.  If she had any inkling of the truth, how would she feel?  For he knew that Myra was proud, sensitive, independent in spirit far beyond her capacity for actual independence.  If she even suspected his identity, the borrowing of that money would surely sting her.  But Hollister put that notion aside.