that which
he had innocently assumed to be a woman's crowning happiness, had
extinguished finally the last gleaming embers of a flame which might
have been altar fire and hearth fire both in one.

The man's growing apathy at length gave the victory to the woman. If
he did not hate his wife, Stanley Sinclair was so far from loving her
that his thin lips curled mockingly over the recollection of what he
had hoped on his wedding-day. If there is pathos in the lost illusions
of youth, those of middle life are grim tragedy. Sinclair wanted peace
at any price. The masculine intolerance of rivalry was less insistent
than it would have been in a younger man. Out of the wreck of things
he asked to save only quiet and the chance to live a gentleman. His
wife might go her way, so that she showed him a serene face and treated
him with tolerable courtesy. And so tacitly the two made the Great
Compromise.

At fifty-seven Stanley Sinclair was a cynically cheerful philosopher.
He had long before discovered that technically his rights as a husband
were safe. The woman whose vanity is stronger than her affections is
shielded by triple armor, and Annabel's virtue was safe, at least while
her complexion lasted. She was a glutton of admiration, and since the
highest homage a man could pay her charms was to fall in love with her,
she bent her energies unweariedly to bringing him to the point of
candid love-making. With success, her interest waned. A lover might
last six months or even a year, but as a rule he was displaced in
considerably less time by some understudy whom Annabel had thoughtfully
kept in training for the star role.

In Annabel's creed, masculine admiration was the supreme good. It was
the ultimate test of a woman's success, as the ability to make money
tested the success of men. Beauty was precious, because it was the
most effective lure. Talent was not to be despised, since it too could
boast its captives. But the woman who claimed that she prized her gift
for its own sake was guilty of an affectation which could deceive no
one, not at least, so shrewd an observer as Annabel.

At nineteen she had married a man more than twice her age. Since then
her preference for youthfulness had been growing, a phenomenon not
unusual in women of her type. At thirty-seven, she looked upon her
husband as senile, patriarchal, as far removed from her generation as
the Pilgrim fathers. Men of her own age bored her. They