conditions could Lois be
satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were
an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very
much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one
husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young.
Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man
admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired
her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture,
betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it
accomplished?

How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue--she
could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of
conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations
were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her
woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if
he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to
know--get his guidance-- But Lois was before all things inviolably a
wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and
Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief
moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward,
conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene
Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that
way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she
and Eugene, had met while both were free? The answer was what she had
known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who
was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband.
Justin!

With "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand now, her lips touching the cheek
of the soft little darling thing beside her, she felt that some new
knowledge had been gradually revealed to her, of which she was now
really aware only for the first time. Justin was not looking well--that
was what Dosia had said. Oh, he was _not_ looking well! But she would
make him forget his cares, his anxieties, with this new-found power of
hers; she would bewitch him, take him off his feet, so that he would be
able to think of nothing, of no one, but her--he had not always thought
of her. _She would not pity herself._ She would learn to laugh, even if
it took heroic effort; men liked you to laugh. She had always taken
everything too seriously. The