gher and purer than men,
while equally capable of thought and self-control. He had, it must be
remembered, no great taste for fictional literature. He had not read the
voluminous lucubrations of the modern woman writer. He had not assisted
at the nauseating spectacle of a woman morally turning herself inside
out in three volumes and an interview.

No, this man respected women still; and he paid them an honor which,
thank Heaven, most of them still deserve. He treated them as men in the
sense that he considered them to be under the same code of right and
wrong, of good and evil.

He did not understand what Etta meant when she told him to be careful.
He did not know that the modern social code is like the Spanish
grammar--there are so many exceptions that the rules are hardly worth
noting. And one of our most notorious modern exceptions is the married
woman who is pleased to hold herself excused because outsiders tell her
that her husband does not understand her.

"I do not think," said Paul judicially, "that you can have cared very
much whether I loved you or not. When you married me you knew that I was
the promoter of the Charity League; I almost told you. I told you so
much that, with your knowledge, you must have been aware of the fact
that I was heavily interested in the undertaking which you betrayed. You
married me without certain proof of your husband's death, such was your
indecent haste to call yourself a princess. And now I find, on your own
confession, that you have a clandestine understanding with a man who
tried to murder me only a week ago. Is it not rather absurd to talk of
caring?"

He stood looking down at her, cold and terrible in the white heat of his
suppressed Northern anger.

The little clock on the mantel-piece, in a terrible hurry, ticked with
all its might. Time was speeding. Every moment was against her. And she
could think of nothing to say simply because those things that she would
have said to others would carry no weight with this man.

Etta was leaning forward in the luxurious chair, staring with haggard
eyes into the fire. The flames leaped up and gleamed on her pale face,
in her deep eyes.

"I suppose," she said, without looking at him, "that you will not
believe me when I tell you that I hate the man. I knew nothing of what
you refer to as happening last week; his attempt to murder you, I mean.
You are a prince, and all-powerful in your own province. Can you not
throw him into p