She felt that his eccentric way of treating the engagement would justify her in keeping Arkwright in reserve.  But she was finding that there were limits to her ability to endure her own self-contempt, and she sacrificed Grant to her outraged self-respect.  Possibly she might have been less conscientious had she not come to look on Grant as an exceedingly pale and shadowy personality, a mere vague expression of well-bred amiability, male because trousered, identifiable chiefly by the dollar mark.

Her reward seemed immediate.  There came a day when Craig was all devotion, was talking incessantly of their future, was never once doubtful or even low-spirited.  It was simply a question of when they would marry—­whether as soon as Stillwater fixed his date for retiring, or after Craig was installed.  She had to listen patiently to hours on hours of discussion as to which would be the better time.  She had to seem interested, though from the viewpoint of her private purposes nothing could have been less important.  She had no intention of permitting him to waste his life and hers in the poverty and uncertainty of public office, struggling for the applause of mobs one despised as individuals and would not permit to cross one’s threshold.  But she had to let him talk on and on, and yet on.  In due season, when she was ready to speak and he to hear, she would disclose to him the future she had mapped out for him, not before.  He discoursed; she listened.  At intervals he made love in his violent, terrifying way; she endured, now half-liking it, now half-hating it and him, but always enduring, passive, as became a modest, inexperienced maiden, and with never a suggestion of her real thoughts upon her surface.

It was the morning after one of these outbursts of his, one of unusual intensity, one that had so worn upon her nerves that, all but revolted by the sense of sick satiety, she had come perilously near to indulging herself in the too costly luxury of telling him precisely what she thought of him and his conduct.  She was in bed, with the blinds just up, and the fair, early-summer world visioning itself to her sick heart like Paradise to the excluded Peri at its barred gate.  “And if he had given me half a chance I’d have loved him,” she was thinking.  “I do believe in him, and admire his strength and his way of never accepting defeat.  But how can I—­how can I—­when he makes me the victim of these ruffian moods of his?  I almost think the Frenchman was right who said that every man ought to have two wives. ...Not that at times he doesn’t attract me that way.  But because one likes champagne one does not wish it by the cask.  A glass now and then, or a bottle—­perhaps—­” Aloud:  “What is it, Selina?”

“A note for you, ma’am, from him.  It’s marked important and immediate.  You told me not to disturb you with those marked important, nor with those marked immediate.  But you didn’t say what to do about those marked both.”