[Illustration:  “’You won’t make an out-and-out idiot of yourself, will you Ursula?’”]

III

The brother and sister dined alone.  Clayton was, finding his club a more comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife’s disillusionment and hesitation about the future.  Many weak creatures are curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence—­some with fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with porcupine quills, some with a ’possumlike instinct for “playing dead.”  Of these last was Fitzhugh.  He knew when to be silent, when to keep out of the way, when to “sit tight” and wait.  His wife had discovered that he was a fool—­that he perhaps owed more to his tailor than to any other single factor for the success of his splendid pose of the thorough gentleman.  Yet she did not realize what an utter fool he was, so clever had he been in the use of the art of discreet silence.  Norman suspected him, but could not believe a human being capable of such fathomless vacuity as he found whenever he tried to explore his brother-in-law’s brain.

After dinner Norman took Ursula to the opera, to join the Seldins, and after the first act went to Josephine, who had come with only a deaf old aunt.  Josephine loved music, and to hear an opera from a box one must be alone.  Norman entered as the lights went up.  It always gave him a feeling of dilation, this spectacle of material splendor—­the women, whose part it is throughout civilization to-day to wear for public admiration and envy the evidences of the prowess of the males to whom they belong.  A truer version of Dr. Holmes’s aphorism would be that it takes several generations in oil to make a deep-dyed snob—­wholly to destroy a man’s or a woman’s point of view, sense of the kinship of all flesh, and to make him or her over into the genuine believer in caste and worshiper of it.  For all his keenness of mind, of humor, Norman had the fast-dyed snobbishness of his family and friends.  He knew that caste was silly, that such displays as this vulgar flaunting of jewels and costly dresses were in atrocious bad taste.  But it is one thing to know, another thing to feel; and his feeling was delight in the spectacle, pride in his own high rank in the aristocracy.

His eyes rested with radiant pleasure on the girl he was to marry.  And she was indeed a person to appeal to the passion of pride.  Simply and most expensively dressed in pearl satin, with only a little jewelry, she sat in the front of her parterre box, a queen by right of her father’s wealth, her family’s position, her own beauty.  She was a large woman—­tall, a big frame but not ungainly.  She had brilliant dark eyes, a small proud head set upon shoulders that were slenderly young now and, even when they should became matronly, would still be beautiful.  She had good teeth, an exquisite smile, the gentle good humor of those who, comfortable themselves, would not have the slightest objection to all others being equally so.  Because she laughed appreciatively and repeated amusingly she had great reputation for wit.  Because she industriously picked up from men a plausible smatter of small talk about politics, religion, art and the like, she was renowned as clever verging on profound.  And she believed herself both witty and wise—­as do thousands, male and female, with far less excuse.