Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two favourites of the gods!  I never grew weary of speculating about them, and the mystery of their alliance.  How had Sylvia come to make this marriage?  She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him.  Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she could do to her family?

I was beginning to believe this.  Irritated as she was by the solemn snobberies of van Tuiver’s world, it was none the less true that she believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me as I came to realise it.  Everybody had to have money; the social graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it.  The rich needed it—­even the poor needed it!  Could it be that the proud Castlemans of Castleman County had needed it also?

If that guess at her inmost soul was correct, then what a drama was her meeting with me!  A person who despised money, who had proven it by grim deeds—­and this a person of her own money-worshipping sex!  What was the meaning of this phenomenon—­this new religion that was challenging the priesthood of Mammon?  So some Roman consul’s daughter might have sat in her father’s palace, and questioned in wonder a Christian slave woman, destined ere long to face the lions in the arena.

The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ.  Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor.  As we sat and talked, she knew this one thing quite definitely—­that I had a religion, and she had none.  That was the reason for the excitement which possessed her.

Nor was that fact ever out of my own mind for a moment.  As she sat there in her sun-flooded morning-room, clad in an exquisite embroidered robe of pink Japanese silk, she was such a lovely thing that I was ready to cry out for joy of her; and yet there was something within me, grim and relentless, that sat on guard, warning me that she was of a different faith from mine, and that between those two faiths there could be no compromise.  Some day she must find out what I thought of her husband’s wealth, and the work it was doing in the world!  Some day she must hear my real opinion of the religion of motor-cars and hand-woven carpets!

13.  Nor was the day so very far off.  She sat opposite me, leaning forward in her eagerness, declaring:  “You must help to educate me.  I shall never rest until I’m of some real use in the world.”

“What have you thought of doing?” I inquired.

“I don’t know yet.  My husband has an aunt who’s interested in a day-nursery for the children of working-women.  I thought I might help this, but my husband says it does no good whatever—­it only makes paupers of the poor.  Do you think so?”