When he had gone, Carmen sat a long time by the fire reflecting.  It would be sweet to humiliate the Delancy and Schuyler Blunt set, as Henderson could.  But what would she gain by that?  It would be sweeter still to put them under obligations, and profit by that.  She had endured a good many social rebuffs in her day, this tolerant little woman, and the sting of their memory could only be removed when the people who had ignored her had to seek social favors she could give.  If Henderson only cared as much for such things as she did!  But he was at times actually brutal about it.  He seemed to have only one passion.  She herself liked money, but only for what it would bring.  Henderson was like an old Pharaoh, who was bound to build the biggest pyramid ever built to his memory; he hated to waste a block.  But what was the good of that when one had passed beyond the reach of envy?

Revolving these deep things in her mind, she went to her dressing-room and made an elaborate toilet for dinner.  Yet it was elaborately simple.  That sort needed more study than the other.  She would like to be the Carmen of ten years ago in Henderson’s eyes.

Her lord came home late, and did not dress for dinner.  It was often so, and the omission was usually not allowed to pass by Carmen without notice, to which Henderson was sure to growl that he didn’t care to be always on dress parade.  Tonight Carmen was all graciousness and warmth.  Henderson did not seem to notice it.  He ate his dinner abstractedly, and responded only in monosyllables to her sweet attempts at conversation.  The fact was that the day had been a perplexing one; he was engaged in one of his big fights, a scheme that aroused all his pugnacity and taxed all his resources.  He would win—­of course; he would smash everybody, but he would win.  When he was in this mood Carmen felt that she was like a daisy in the path of a cyclone.  In the first year of their marriage he used to consult her about all his schemes, and value her keen understanding.  She wondered why he did not now.  Did he distrust even her, as he did everybody else?  Tonight she asked no questions.  She was unruffled by his short responses to her conversational attempts; by her subtle, wifely manner she simply put herself on his side, whatever the side was.

In the library she brought him his cigar, and lighted it.  She saw that his coffee was just as he liked it.  As she moved about, making things homelike, Henderson noticed that she was more Carmenish than he had seen her in a long time.  The sweet ways and the simple toilet must be by intention.  And he knew her so well.  He began to be amused and softened.  At length he said, in his ordinary tone, “Well, what is it?”

“What is what, dear?”

“What do you want?”

Carmen looked perplexed and sweetly surprised.  There is nothing so pitiful about habitual hypocrisy as that it never deceives anybody.  It was not the less painful now that Carmen knew that Henderson knew her to the least fibre of her self-seeking soul, and that she felt that there were currents in his life that she could not calculate.  A man is so much more difficult to understand than a woman, she reflected.  And yet he is so susceptible that he can be managed even when he knows he is being managed.  Carmen was not disconcerted for a moment.  She replied, with her old candor: