She paused a moment.  “I’ll do just as you wish,” she returned pliantly.  “I thought it would be less awkward to speak to him when we meet.”

Her pliancy was beginning to sicken him.  Had she really no will of her own—­no theory about her relation to these men?  She had accepted Haskett—­did she mean to accept Varick?  It was “less awkward,” as she had said, and her instinct was to evade difficulties or to circumvent them.  With sudden vividness Waythorn saw how the instinct had developed.  She was “as easy as an old shoe”—­a shoe that too many feet had worn.  Her elasticity was the result of tension in too many different directions.  Alice Haskett—­Alice Varick—­Alice Waythorn—­she had been each in turn, and had left hanging to each name a little of her privacy, a little of her personality, a little of the inmost self where the unknown god abides.

“Yes—­it’s better to speak to Varick,” said Waythorn wearily.

“Earth’s Martyrs.”  By Stephen Phillips.

V

THE WINTER wore on, and society took advantage of the Waythorns’ acceptance of Varick.  Harassed hostesses were grateful to them for bridging over a social difficulty, and Mrs. Waythorn was held up as a miracle of good taste.  Some experimental spirits could not resist the diversion of throwing Varick and his former wife together, and there were those who thought he found a zest in the propinquity.  But Mrs. Waythorn’s conduct remained irreproachable.  She neither avoided Varick nor sought him out.  Even Waythorn could not but admit that she had discovered the solution of the newest social problem.

He had married her without giving much thought to that problem.  He had fancied that a woman can shed her past like a man.  But now he saw that Alice was bound to hers both by the circumstances which forced her into continued relation with it, and by the traces it had left on her nature.  With grim irony Waythorn compared himself to a member of a syndicate.  He held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business.  If there had been any element of passion in the transaction he would have felt less deteriorated by it.  The fact that Alice took her change of husbands like a change of weather reduced the situation to mediocrity.  He could have forgiven her for blunders, for excesses; for resisting Hackett, for yielding to Varick; for anything but her acquiescence and her tact.  She reminded him of a juggler tossing knives; but the knives were blunt and she knew they would never cut her.