their own opinion on the details of it. However, I did
not care. I had worked for my own sake; lived correctly for my own
sake--and whether another knew it or not mattered to me not at all.

"No; on the contrary, I am very pleased to be back," I said. "I always
look upon the place where you are as home."

A pleased expression came over his face as I spoke. We were sincerely
attached to each other in spite of the jarring dissonance of character.
Later that same morning when I was sitting beside Lucia as we drove to
the Academy, I studied her closely in the sharp morning light, and I
was alarmed at the pallor and exhaustion of her face. I am not an
admirer of ill-health in any form. The hectic flush of phthisis, even,
dear to the poets, has positively no charm for me; and Lucia's illness
was not phthisis, and certainly did not enhance her looks.

"Who is your medical man, Lucia?" I asked.

"Why do you wish to know?"

"That I may be satisfied that he is a good one."

"I should prefer not to tell you his name."

"Why?"

"Because I object," she said simply, in her coldest tone.

"That is not a sufficient reason."

"I am of opinion that it is," she returned frigidly, with a
supercilious accent.

I leant back in the carriage without answering, and looked away from
her. How I hated her in that moment! After all, I thought, why do you
trouble to get this particular woman above everything? Fifty women that
you meet in the course of a week are as pretty--possibly of more
worth--probably more civil. Why not select a more accessible divinity?
Or else content yourself with Horace's parabilem venerem facilemque?

Then I glanced involuntarily at her, and I knew it was impossible. My
eyes swept over the form beside me, as she sat cold, impassive; her
attitude one of quiet ease, her whole mien the essence of calm
self-possession. That excess of pride and dignity and supercilious
arrogance that in Lucia replaced, at times, her seductive plasticity at
others, had always exercised a violent attraction over me. And now,
when this pride seemed joined with a positive hostility to myself, it
failed to repel; it simply raised to its highest pitch a savage and
acrimonious determination to subdue it.

As I sat silent, with my eyes turned away from her to the blaze of
glaring pavement and roadway, and noted mechanically the crush of
traffic on ahead, Dick's remark on my brutality recurred to me, and I
forced the most good-natured sm