But quick-witted and cold-blooded as she was, she could not see that Clarence was actually a little afraid of her.  He had been too rich all his life to count his money as an argument in his favor, and although he was not clever he knew Rachael did not love him, and hardly supposed that she ever could.

He felt with paternal blindness that she had married him partly for the child’s sake, and returned to the companionship of his daughter with a real sense of relief.

Rachael, in turn, was puzzled.  Carol was undeniably a pretty child, with all a spoiled child’s confident charm, but in all good-natured generosity Rachael could not see in her the subtle and irresistible fascinations that her father so eagerly exploited.  Surely no girl of ten, however gifted, could be reasonably supposed to eclipse completely the woman Rachael knew herself to be; surely no parental infatuation could extend itself to the point of a remarriage with the bettering of a small child’s position alone the object.

Philosophy came promptly to the aid of the new-made wife.  Billy was a child, and Clarence a greater child.  The situation was annoying, was belittling to her own pride, but she would meet it with dignity nevertheless.  After all, the visible benefits of the marriage were still hers:  the new car, the new furs, the new and wonderful sense of financial ease, of social certainty.

She schooled herself to listen with an indulgent smile to her husband’s fond rhapsodies about his daughter.  She agreed amiably that Billy would be a great beauty, a heart-breaker, that “the little monkey had all the other women crazy with jealousy now, by Jove!” She selected the little gowns and hats in which the radiant Billy went off for long days alone with “Daddy,” and she presently graciously consented to share the little girl’s luxurious room because Billy sometimes awakened nervously at night.  Rachael had been accustomed to difficulties in dealing with the persons nearest her; she met them resolutely.  Sometimes a baffling sense of failure smote the surface of her life, like a cold wind that turns to white metal the smooth waters of a lake, but she held her head proudly above it, and even Clarence and his daughter never guessed what she endured.  What did it matter?  Rachael asked herself wearily.  She had not asked for love.  She had resolutely exchanged what she had to give for what she had determined to get; Clarence had made no blind protestations, had expected no golden romance.  He admired her; she knew he thought it was splendid of her to manage the engagement and marriage with so little fuss; perhaps his jaded pulses fluttered a little when Rachael, exquisite in her bridal newness, stooped at the railway station to give the drooping Billy a good-bye kiss, and promise that in three days they would be back to rescue her from the hated governess; but paramount above all other emotions, she suspected, was the tremendous satisfaction of having gained just the right woman to straighten out his tangled domestic affairs, just the mother, as the years went by, to do the correct thing for Billy.