d; "and
you're attending to your end, aren't you?"

"Yes, the little end," Cicily agreed, disparagingly.

At that, Hamilton was plainly exasperated.

"What end did you expect?" he demanded. "I tell you, Cicily," he
continued, in the tone of one arguing with labored patience to convince
a child of some truism, "that business is too big, too serious, too
strong for a woman like you, my dear."

"Yes, that's just the fear that grips my heart sometimes, Charles," the
wife admitted. With an ingenuity characteristic of her active
intelligence, she had perceived a method whereby to twist his words to
her own purpose. "Look here!" she went on in a caressing voice, utterly
unlike the emphatic one in which she had spoken hitherto. "Do you for a
moment imagine that I really like business? Well, then, I don't--not a
little bit! For that matter, hardly any woman does, I fancy. As to
myself, Charles, I'm afraid of it--that's the whole truth. I'm only in
it to watch it--and you!"

The change in her manner had immediate effect on the husband. Again, he
was surveying her with eyes in which admiration shone. For the
ten-thousandth time, he was reveling in the beauty of that oval contour,
in the tender curves of the scarlet lips.... But he forgot to voice his
thoughts. Indeed, what need? He had told her so many times already!

"You talk as if business were a woman," he said, with a smile of
conscious sex superiority, "and as if you were jealous."

Cicily concealed her resentment of the patronizing manner, and replied
with no apparent diminution in her amiability:

"That's just it: I am jealous!"

"Good heavens!" Hamilton cried, indignantly. "Surely, you know that I
never think twice of any woman I meet in business."

The wife smiled in high disdain.

"Woman!" she ejaculated, with scornful emphasis. "I'm not in the least
afraid of any woman being more to you than I am, Charles. Just let one
try!"

"Why, what would you do?" Hamilton inquired, curiously.

The answer was swift and vigorous, pregnant with the insolent
consciousness of power that is the prerogative of a lovely woman. Cicily
leaned forward in her chair, and the golden eyes darkened and flashed.

"Why, I'd beat her! I'd be everything to you that she was--and more. I'd
outdress her, I'd out-talk her, I'd outwit her, I'd out-think her. I'd
play on your love and on your masculine jealousy. Oh, there'd be plenty
of men to play the play with me. I'd be more alluring, m