If Howard had come home before midnight it is possible that she might have tried to sound him as to his relations with Trixton Brent.  That gentleman, she remembered, had the reputation of being a peculiarly hardheaded business man, and it was of course absurd that he should offer her husband a position merely to please her.  And her imagination failed her when she tried to think of Howard as the president of a trust company.  She was unable to picture him in a great executive office: 

This tram of thought led her to the unaccustomed task of analyzing his character.  For the first time since her marriage comparisons crept into her mind, and she awoke to the fact that he was not a masterful man—­even among men.  For all his self-confidence-self-assurance, perhaps, would be the better word—­he was in reality a follower, not a leader; a gleaner.  He did not lack ideas.  She tried to arrest the process in her brain when she got as far as asking herself whether it might not be that he lacked ideals.  Since in business matters he never had taken her into his confidence, and since she would not at any rate have understood such things, she had no proof of such a failing.  But one or two vague remarks of Trixton Brent’s which she recalled, and Howard’s own request that she should be friendly with Brent, reenforced her instinct on this point.

When she heard her husband’s footstep on the porch, she put out her light, but still lay thinking in the darkness.  Her revelations had arrived at the uncomfortable stage where they began to frighten her, and with an effort she forced herself to turn to the other side of the account.  The hour was conducive to exaggerations.  Perfection in husbands was evidently a state not to be considered by any woman in her right senses.  He was more or less amenable, and he was prosperous, although definite news of that prosperity never came from him—­Quicksands always knew of it first.  An instance of this second-hand acquisition of knowledge occurred the very next morning, when Lily Dallam, with much dignity, walked into Honora’s little sitting-room.  There was no apparent reason why dignity should not have been becoming to Lily Dallam, for she was by no means an unimpressive-looking woman; but the assumption by her of that quality always made her a little tragic or (if one chanced to be in the humour—­Honora was not) a little ridiculous.

“I suppose I have no pride,” she said, as she halted within a few feet of the doorway.

“Why, Lily!” exclaimed Honora, pushing back the chair from her desk, and rising.

But Mrs. Dallam did not move.

“I suppose I have no pride,” she repeated in a dead voice, “but I just couldn’t help coming over and giving you a chance.”

“Giving me a chance?” said Honora.

“To explain—­after the way you treated me at the polo game.  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I shouldn’t have believed it.  I don’t think I should have trusted my own eyes,” Mrs. Dallam went so far as to affirm, “if Lula Chandos and Clara Trowbridge and others hadn’t been there and seen it too; I shouldn’t have believed it.”