Check!  She reddened with guilt and exasperation.  “What a sly trick!” thought she.  She answered him with a cold:  “I always have read myself to sleep, and I fancy I always shall.”

“If you went to sleep earlier,” observed he, his air unmistakably that of the victor conscious of victory, “you’d not keep me raging round two or three hours for breakfast.”

“How often I’ve asked you not to wait for me!  I prefer to breakfast alone, anyhow.  It’s the dreadful habit of breakfasting together that causes people to get on together so badly.”

“I’d not feel right,” said he, moderately, but firmly, “if I didn’t see you at breakfast.”

She sat silent—­thinking.  He felt what she was thinking—­how common this was, how “middle class,” how “bourgeois,” she was calling it.  “Bourgeois” was her favorite word for all that she objected to in him, for all she was trying to train out of him by what she regarded as most artistically indirect lessons.  He felt that their talk about his family, what he had said, had shown he felt, was recurring to her.  He grew red, burned with shame from head to foot.

“What a fool, what a pup I was!” he said to himself.  “If she had been a real lady—­no, by gad—­a real woman—­she’d have shown that she despised me.”

Again and again that incident had come back to him.  It had been, perhaps, the most powerful factor in his patience with her airs and condescensions.  He felt that it, the lowest dip of his degradation in snobism, had given her the right to keep him in his place.  It seemed to him one of those frightful crimes against self-respect which can never be atoned, and, bad as he thought it from the standpoint of good sense as to the way to get on with her, he suffered far more because it was such a stinging, scoffing denial of all his pretenses of personal pride.  “Her sensibilities have been too blunted by association with those Washington vulgarians,” he reasoned, “for her to realize the enormity of my offense, but she realizes enough to look down at me more contemptuously every time she recalls it.”  However, the greater the blunder the greater the necessity of repairing.  He resolutely thrust his self-abasing thoughts to the background of his mind, and began afresh.

“I’m sure,” said he, “you’d not mind, once you got used to it.”

She was startled out of her abstraction.  “Used to—­what?” she inquired.

“To getting up early.”

“Oh!” She gave a relieved laugh.  “Still harping on that.  How persistent you are!”

“You could accomplish twice as much if you got up early and made a right start.”

She frowned slightly.  “Couldn’t think of it,” said she, in the tone of one whose forbearance is about at an end.  “I hate the early morning.”

“We usually hate what’s best for us.  But, if we’re sensible, we do it until it becomes a habit that we don’t mind—­or positively like.”