The walk was a mere matter of a dozen blocks.  He thought it would never end.  “You are sure you aren’t ill?” she said, when they were at her door—­a superb bronze door it was, opening into a house of the splendor that for the acclimated New Yorker quite conceals and more than compensates absence of individual taste.  “You don’t look ill.  But you act queerly.”

“I’m often this way when they drive me too hard down town.”

She looked at him with fond admiration; he might have been better pleased had there not been in the look a suggestion of the possessive.  “How they do need you!  Father says—­But I mustn’t make you any vainer than you are.”

He usually loved compliment, could take it in its rawest form with fine human gusto.  Now, he did not care enough about that “father says” to rise to her obvious bait.  “I’m horribly tired,” he said.  “Shall I see you to-morrow?  No, I guess not—­not for several days.  You understand?”

“Perfectly,” replied she.  “I’ll miss you dreadfully, but my father has trained me well.  I know I mustn’t be selfish—­and tempt you to neglect things.”

“Thank you,” said he.  “I must be off.”

“You’ll come in—­just a moment?” Her eyes sparkled.  “The butler will have sense enough to go straight away—­and the small reception room will be quite empty as usual.”

He could not escape.  A few seconds and he was alone with her in the little room—­how often had he—­they—­been glad of its quiet and seclusion on such occasions!  She laid her hand upon his shoulders, gazed at him proudly.  “It was here,” said she, “that you first kissed me.  Do you remember?”

To take her gaze from his face and to avoid seeing her look of loving trust, he put his arms round her.  “I don’t deserve you,” he said—­one of those empty pretenses of confession that yet give the human soul a sense of truthfulness.

“You’d not say that if you knew how happy you make me,” murmured she.

The welcome sound of a step in the hall give him his release.  When he was in the street, he wiped his hot face with his handkerchief.  “And I thought I had no moral sense left!” he reflected—­not the first man, in this climax day of the triumph of selfish philosophies, to be astonished by the discovery that the dead hands of heredity and tradition have a power that can successfully defy reason.

He started to walk back home, on impulse took a passing taxi and went to his club.  It was the Federal.  They said of it that no man who amounted to anything in New York could be elected a member, because any man on his way up could not but offend one or more of the important persons in control.  Most of its members were nominated at birth or in childhood and elected as soon as they were twenty-one.  Norman was elected after he became a man of consequence.  He regarded it as one of the signal triumphs of his career; and beyond question it was proof of his power, of the eagerness of important men, despite their jealousy,