tortures of suspense.  How many tragedies of this sort are there nightly in the metropolis, none the less tragic because they are subjects of jest in the comic papers and on the stage!  What would be the condition of social life if women ceased to be anxious in this regard, and let loose the reins in an easy-going indifference?  What, in fact, is the condition in those households where the wives do not care?  One can even perceive a tender sort of loyalty to women in the ejaculation of that battered old veteran, the Major, “Thank God, there’s nobody sitting up for me!”

Jack was not consciously rude.  He even asked about the baby.  And he sipped his coffee and glanced over the morning journal, and he referred to the conversation of the night before, and said that he would look after the purchase at once.  If Edith had put on an aspect of injury, and had intimated that she had hoped that his first evening at home might have been devoted to her and the boy, there might have been a scene, for Jack needed only an occasion to vent his discontent.  And for the chronicler of social life a scene is so much easier to deal with, an outburst of temper and sharp language, of accusation and recrimination, than the well-bred commonplace of an undefined estrangement.

And yet estrangement is almost too strong a word to use in Jack’s case.  He would have been the first to resent it.  But the truth was that Edith, in the life he was leading, was a rebuke to him; her very purity and unworldliness were out of accord with his associations, with his ventures, with his dissipations in that smart and glittering circle where he was more welcome the more he lowered his moral standards.  Could he help it if after the first hours of his return he felt the restraint of his home, and that the life seemed a little flat?  Almost unconsciously to himself, his interests and his inclinations were elsewhere.

Edith, with the divination of a woman, felt this.  Last night her love alone seemed strong enough to hold him, to bring him back to the purposes and the aspirations that only last summer had appeared to transform him.  Now he was slipping away again.  How pitiful it is, this contest of a woman who has only her own love, her own virtue, with the world and its allurements and seductions, for the possession of her husband’s heart!  How powerless she is against these subtle invitations, these unknown and all-encompassing temptations!  At times the whole drift of life, of the easy morality of the time, is against her.  The current is so strong that no wonder she is often swept away in it.  And what could an impartial observer of things as they are say otherwise than that John Delancy was leading the common life of his kind and his time, and that Edith was only bringing trouble on herself by being out of sympathy with it?

He might not be in at luncheon, he said, when he was prepared to go down-town.  He seldom was.  He called at his broker’s.  Still suspense.  He wrote to the Long Island farmer.  At the Union he found a scented note from Carmen.  They had all returned from the capital.  How rejoiced she was to be at home!  And she was dying to see him; no, not dying, but very much living; and it was very important.  She should expect him at the usual hour.  And could he guess what gown she would wear?