years--just long enough to realize that he had married a
charming, tolerant, broad-minded woman. Then he died of pneumonia and
Mrs. Gerald was a rich widow, sympathetic, attractive, delightful in
her knowledge of the world, and with nothing to do except to live and
to spend her money.

She was not inclined to do either indifferently. She had long since
had her ideal of a man established by Lester. These whipper-snappers
of counts, earls, lords, barons, whom she met in one social world and
another (for her friendship and connections had broadened notably with
the years), did not interest her a particle. She was terribly weary of
the superficial veneer of the titled fortune-hunter whom she met
abroad. A good judge of character, a student of men and manners, a
natural reasoner along sociologic and psychologic lines, she saw
through them and through the civilization which they represented. "I
could have been happy in a cottage with a man I once knew out in
Cincinnati," she told one of her titled women friends who had been an
American before her marriage. "He was the biggest, cleanest, sanest
fellow. If he had proposed to me I would have married him if I had had
to work for a living myself."

"Was he so poor?" asked her friend.

"Indeed he wasn't. He was comfortably rich, but that did not make
any difference to me. It was the man I wanted."

"It would have made a difference in the long run," said the
other.

"You misjudge me," replied Mrs. Gerald. "I waited for him for a
number of years, and I know."

Lester had always retained pleasant impressions and kindly memories
of Letty Pace, or Mrs. Gerald, as she was now. He had been fond of her
in a way, very fond. Why hadn't he married her? He had asked himself
that question time and again. She would have made him an ideal wife,
his father would have been pleased, everybody would have been
delighted. Instead he had drifted and drifted, and then he had met
Jennie; and somehow, after that, he did not want her any more. Now
after six years of separation he met her again. He knew she was
married. She was vaguely aware he had had some sort of an
affair--she had heard that he had subsequently married the woman
and was living on the South Side. She did not know of the loss of his
fortune. She ran across him first in the Carlton one June evening. The
windows were open, and the flowers were blooming everywhere, odorous
with that sense of new life in the air which runs through the