“Then why do you do it, Fred?” urged she with ill-concealed eagerness.  “It isn’t fair to the girl, is it?”

“No one but you and Tetlow knows I’m doing it.”

“You’re mistaken there, dear.  Tetlow says a great many people down town are talking about it—­that they say you go almost every day to Jersey City to see her.  He accuses you of having ruined her reputation.  He says she is quite innocent.  He blames the whole thing upon you.”

Norman, standing with arms folded upon his broad chest, was gazing thoughtfully into the fire.

“You don’t mind my telling you these things?” she said anxiously.  “Of course, I know they are lies——­”

“So everyone is talking about it,” interrupted he, so absorbed that he had not heard her.

“You don’t realize how conspicuous you are.”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “Well, it can’t be helped.”

“You can’t afford to be mixed up in a scandal,” she ventured, “or to injure a poor little creature—­I’m afraid you’ll have to—­to stop it.”

“Stop it.”  His eyes gleamed with mirth and something else.  “It isn’t my habit to heed gossip.”

“But think of her, Fred!”

He smiled ironically.  “What a generous, thoughtful dear you are!” said he.

She blushed.  “I’ll admit I don’t like it.  I’m not jealous—­but I wish you weren’t doing it.”

“So do I!” he exclaimed, with sudden energy that astonished and disquieted her.  “So do I!  But since it can’t be helped I shall go on.”

Never had she respected him so profoundly.  For the first time she had measured strength with him and had been beaten and routed.  She fancied herself enormously proud; for she labored under the common delusion which mistakes for pride the silly vanity of class, or birth, or wealth, or position.  She had imagined she would never lower that cherished pride of hers to any man.  And she had lowered it into the dust.  No wonder women had loved him, she said to herself; couldn’t he do with them, even the haughtiest of them, precisely as he pleased?  He had not tried to calm, much less to end her jealousy; on the contrary, he had let it flame as high as it would, had urged it higher.  And she did not dare ask him, even as a loving concession to her weakness, to give up an affair upon which everybody was putting the natural worst possible construction!  On the contrary, she had given him leave to go on—­because she feared—­yes, knew—­that if she tried to interfere he would take it as evidence that they could not get on together.  What a man!

* * * * *

But there was more to come that day.  As he was finishing dressing for dinner his sister Ursula knocked.  “May I come, Frederick?” she said.

“Sure,” he cried.  “I’m fixing my tie.”

Ursula, in a gown that displayed the last possible—­many of the homelier women said impossible—­inch of her beautiful shoulders, came strolling sinuously in and seated herself on the arm of the divan.  She watched him, in his evening shirt, as he with much struggling did his tie.  “How young you do look, Fred!” said she.  “Especially in just that much clothes.  Not a day over thirty.”