If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations.  The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off.  It might still be called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and Carmen’s idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home.  She had made it like herself.  There were pictures on the walls that would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson’s time; and the prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness.  Life, she said, was her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little Greek.  Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was simplicity.  The dinner was simple.  Her dress was exceedingly simple, save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman.  She knew herself better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he muttered, “But it needn’t be the seamy side.”  The reported remark of some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam’s comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”

The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as a library.  Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or enjoy it.  Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness.  But Carmen liked the room above all others.  She enjoyed her cigarette there, and had a fancy for pouring her five-o’clock tea in its shelter.  Books which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one couldn’t say in a drawing-room.

Henderson himself, it must be confessed, had grown stout in the ten years, and puffy under the eyes.  There were lines of irritation in his face and lines of weariness.  He had not kept the freshness of youth so well as Carmen, perhaps because of his New England conscience.  To his guest he was courteous, seemed to be making an effort to be so, and listened with well-assumed interest to the story of her day’s pilgrimage.  At length he said, with a smile, “Life seems to interest you, Mrs. Delancy.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Edith, looking up brightly; “doesn’t it you?”

“Why, yes; not life exactly, but things, doing things—­conflict.”

“Yes, I can understand that.  There is so much to be done for everybody.”

Henderson looked amused.  “You know in the city the gospel is that everybody is to be done.”

“Well,” said Edith, not to be diverted, “but, Mr. Henderson, what is it all for—­this conflict?  Perhaps, however, you are fighting the devil?”