The first course of the supper arrived.  Her nervousness vanished, and he got far away from the neighborhood of the subjects that, even in remotest hint, could not but agitate her.  And as the food and the wine asserted their pacific and beatific sway, she and he steadily moved into better and better humor with each other.  Her beauty grew until it had him thinking that never, not in the most spiritual feminine conceptions of the classic painters, had he seen a loveliness more ethereal.  Her skin was so exquisite, the coloring of her hair and eyes and of her lips was so delicately fine that it gave her the fragility of things bordering upon the supernal—­of rare exotics, of sunset and moonbeam effects.  No, he had been under no spell of illusion as to her beauty.  It was a reality—­the more fascinating because it waxed and waned not with regularity of period but capriciously.

He began to look round furtively, to see what effect this wife of his was producing on others.  These last few months, through prudence as much as through pride, he had been cultivating the habit of ignoring his surroundings; he would not invite cold salutations or obvious avoidance of speaking.  He now discovered many of his former associates—­and his vanity dilated as he noted how intensely they were interested in his wife.

Some men of ability have that purest form of egotism which makes one profoundly content with himself, genuinely indifferent to the approval or the disapproval of others.  Norman’s vanity had a certain amount of alloy.  He genuinely disdained his fellow-men—­their timidity, their hypocrisy, their servility, their limited range of ideas.  He was indifferent to the verge of insensibility as to their adverse criticism.  But at the same time it was necessary to his happiness that he get from them evidences of their admiration and envy.  With that amusing hypocrisy which tinges all human nature, he concealed from himself the satisfaction, the joy even, he got out of the showy side of his position.  And no feature of his infatuation for Dorothy surprised him so much as the way it rode rough shod and reckless over his snobbishness.

With the fading of infatuation had come many reflections upon the practical aspects of what he had done.  It pleased him with himself to find that, in this first test, he had not the least regret, but on the contrary a genuine pride in the courageous independence he had shown—­another and strong support to his conviction of his superiority to his fellow-men.  He might be somewhat snobbish—­who was not?—­who else in his New York was less than supersaturated with snobbishness?  But snobbishness, the determining quality in the natures of all the women and most of the men he knew, had shown itself one of the incidental qualities in his own nature.  After all, reflected he, it took a man, a good deal of a man, to do what he had done, and not to regret it, even in the hour of disillusionment.  And it must be said for this egotistic self-approval of his that like all his judgments there was sound merit of truth in it.  The vanity of the nincompoop is ridiculous.  The vanity of the man of ability is amusing and no doubt due to a defective point of view upon the proportions of the universe; but it is not without excuse, and those who laugh might do well to discriminate even as they guffaw.