ed.... Miss Allsop deftly undid the clasp and hung it around
Maude's neck.

"How it suits you, Mrs. Paret!" she cried....

This pendant was by no means the only present I had given Maude in
recent years, and though she cared as little for jewels as for dress she
seemed to attach to it a peculiar value and significance that disturbed
and smote me, for the incident had revealed a love unchanged and
unchangeable. Had she taken my gift as a sign that my indifference was
melting?

As I went downstairs and into the library to read the financial page of
the morning newspaper I asked myself, with a certain disquiet, whether,
in the formal, complicated, and luxurious conditions in which we now
lived it might be possible to build up new ties and common interests.
I reflected that this would involve confessions and confidences on
my part, since there was a whole side of my life of which Maude knew
nothing. I had convinced myself long ago that a man's business career
was no affair of his wife's: I had justified that career to myself: yet
I had always had a vague feeling that Maude, had she known the details,
would not have approved of it. Impossible, indeed, for a woman to grasp
these problems. They were outside of her experience.

Nevertheless, something might be done to improve our relationship,
something which would relieve me of that uneasy lack of unity I felt
when at home, of the lassitude and ennui I was wont to feel creeping
over me on Sundays and holidays....

XX.

I find in relating those parts of my experience that seem to be of
most significance I have neglected to tell of my mother's death, which
occurred the year before we moved to Grant Avenue. She had clung the
rest of her days to the house in which I had been born. Of late years
she had lived in my children, and Maude's devotion to her had been
unflagging. Truth compels me to say that she had long ceased to be a
factor in my life. I have thought of her in later years.

Coincident with the unexpected feeling of fruitlessness that came to
me with the Grant Avenue house, of things achieved but not realized or
appreciated, was the appearance of a cloud on the business horizon; or
rather on the political horizon, since it is hard to separate the two
realms. There were signs, for those who could read, of a rising popular
storm. During the earliest years of the new century the political
atmosphere had changed, the public had shown a tendency to grow
restles