But Rachael, if she had expected reward, reaped none.  Her husband was a supremely selfish man, and his daughter inherited his sublime ability to protect his own pleasure at any cost.  Carol admired her step-mother, but she was an indolent and luxury-loving little soul, and even as early as her twelfth or fourteenth year she had been deeply flattered by the evidences of her own power over her father.  Into her youthful training no reverence for parents—­real or adopted—­had been infused; she called her father “Clancy,” as some of his intimate friends called him, and he delighted to take her orders and bow to her pretty tyranny.

Before she was sixteen he began to take her about with him:  to dances, to the theatre, and for long trips in his car.  He entered eagerly into her young friendships, frantic to prove himself as young at heart as she.  He paid her the extravagant compliments of a lover, and gave her her grandmother’s beautiful jewelry, as well as every trinket that caught her eye.

And Billy accepted his attentions with a finished coquetry that was far from childlike, a flush on her satin cheek, a dimple puckering the corner of her mouth, and silky lashes lowered over her satisfied eyes.  She was inevitably precocious in many ways, but she was young enough still to fancy herself one of the irresistible beauties and belles of the world, and to flaunt a perfectly conscious arrogance in the eyes of all other women.

All this was bewildering and painful to Rachael.  She had never loved her husband—­love entered into none of her relationships—­ her marriage had been only a step in the steady progress of her life toward the position she desired in the world.  But she had liked him.  She had liked his child, and she had come into the new arrangement kindly and gallantly determined to make the venture at least as profitable to them both as it was to her.

To be ignored, to be deliberately set aside, to be insulted by a selfishness so calculating and so deliberate as to make her own attitude seem all warmth and generosity by comparison, genuinely astonished her.  At first, indeed, a sort of magnificent impatience had prevented her from feeling any stronger emotion than astonishment.  It was too ridiculous, said the bride to herself tolerantly; it could not go on, of course, this preposterous consideration of a child of ten, this belittling consideration of her own place in the scheme as less Clarence’s wife than Billy’s mother.  It must adjust itself with every week that they three lived together, the child slipping back to her own life, the husband and wife sharing theirs.  When Clarence’s first fears for his daughter’s comfort under the new rule were set at rest, when his confidence in the wisdom and efficiency of his wife was fully established, then a normal relationship must ensue.  “Surely Clarence wouldn’t ask a woman to marry him just to give Billy a home and social backing?” Rachael asked herself, in those first puzzled days in Paris.