There was no response.

“Maude—­let me in!  I didn’t mean to be unkind—­I’m sorry.”

After an interval I heard her say:  “I’d rather stay here,—­to-night.”

But at length, after more entreaty and self-abasement on my part, she opened the door.  The room was dark.  We sat down together on the window-seat, and all at once she relaxed and her head fell on my shoulder, and she began weeping again.  I held her, the alternating moods still running through me.

“Hugh,” she said at length, “how could you be so cruel? when you know I love you and would do anything for you.”

“I didn’t mean to be cruel, Maude,” I answered.

“I know you didn’t.  But at times you seem so—­indifferent, and you can’t understand how it hurts.  I haven’t anybody but you, now, and it’s in your power to make me happy or—­or miserable.”

Later on I tried to explain my point of view, to justify myself.

“All I mean,” I concluded at length, “is that my position is a little different from Perry’s and Tom’s.  They can afford to isolate themselves, but I’m thrown professionally with the men who are building up this city.  Some of them, like Ralph Hambleton and Mr. Ogilvy, I’ve known all my life.  Life isn’t so simple for us, Maude—­we can’t ignore the social side.”

“I understand,” she said contentedly.  “You are more of a man of affairs—­much more than Tom or Perry, and you have greater responsibilities and wider interests.  I’m really very proud of you.  Only—­don’t you think you are a little too sensitive about yourself, when you are teased?”

I let this pass....

I give a paragraph from a possible biography of Hugh Paret which, as then seemed not improbable, might in the future have been written by some aspiring young worshipper of success.

“On his return from a brief but delightful honeymoon in England Mr. Paret took up again, with characteristic vigour, the practice of the law.  He was entering upon the prime years of manhood; golden opportunities confronted him as, indeed, they confronted other men—­but Paret had the foresight to take advantage of them.  And his training under Theodore Watling was now to produce results....  The reputations had already been made of some of that remarkable group of financial geniuses who were chiefly instrumental in bringing about the industrial evolution begun after the Civil War:  at the same time, as is well known, a political leadership developed that gave proof of a deplorable blindness to the logical necessity of combinations in business.  The lawyer with initiative and brains became an indispensable factor,” etc., etc.

The biography might have gone on to relate my association with and important services to Adolf Scherer in connection with his constructive dream.  Shortly after my return from abroad, in answer to his summons, I found him at Heinrich’s, his napkin tucked into his shirt front, and a dish of his favourite sausages before him.