her long before the coming of
financial reverses. She was nearing thirty, and in spite of her beauty
and the rarer distinction that can best be described as breeding, she
had never married. Men admired her, but from a distance; she kept them
at arm's length, they said: strangers who visited the city invariably
picked her out of an assembly and asked who she was; one man from New
York who came to visit Ralph and who had been madly in love with her,
she had amazed many people by refusing, spurning all he might have
given her. This incident seemed a refutation of the charge that she was
calculating. As might have been foretold, she had the social gift in
a remarkable degree, and in spite of the limitations of her purse the
knack of dressing better than other women, though at that time the
organization of our social life still remained comparatively simple, the
custom of luxurious and expensive entertainment not having yet set in.

The more I reflect upon those days, the more surprising does it seem
that I was not in love with her. It may be that I was, unconsciously,
for she troubled my thoughts occasionally, and she represented all the
qualities I admired in her sex. The situation that had existed at the
time of our first and only quarrel had been reversed, I was on the
highroad to the worldly success I had then resolved upon, Nancy was
poor, and for that reason, perhaps, prouder than ever. If she was
inaccessible to others, she had the air of being peculiarly inaccessible
to me--the more so because some of the superficial relics of our
intimacy remained, or rather had been restored. Her very manner of
camaraderie seemed paradoxically to increase the distance between us. It
piqued me. Had she given me the least encouragement, I am sure I should
have responded; and I remember that I used occasionally to speculate as
to whether she still cared for me, and took this method of hiding her
real feelings. Yet, on the whole, I felt a certain complacency about it
all; I knew that suffering was disagreeable, I had learned how to avoid
it, and I may have had, deep within me, a feeling that I might marry her
after all. Meanwhile my life was full, and gave promise of becoming even
fuller, more absorbing and exciting in the immediate future.

One of the most fascinating figures, to me, of that Order being woven,
like a cloth of gold, out of our hitherto drab civilization,--an Order
into which I was ready and eager to be initiated,--wa