been given
up to society's demands, until pleasure-seeking and pleasure-giving had
grown into a routine, which occupied his whole mind. His wife saw him
more than she had for many years. Clubs and card-parties had few
temptations for him now; he sat at home and read to her and talked to
her, and did his best to follow the injunctions of the doctor, and
"create and preserve in her a spirit of cheerful and hopeful
tranquillity, free of unnecessary apprehension."

But when he _did_ go to the club, when he was in male society, his
breast expanded, and if he had to answer a polite inquiry as to Mrs.
Dolph's general health, I am afraid that he responded: "Mrs. Dolph is
extremely well, sir, extremely well!" with a pride which the moralists
will tell you is baseless, unworthy, and unreasonable.

As for Aline herself, no one may know what timorous hopes stirred in her
bosom and charmed the years away, and brought back to her a lovely youth
that was almost girlish in its innocent, half-frightened gladness.
Outside, this great, wise, eminently proper world that she lived in
girded at the old woman who was to bear a child, and laughed behind
tasselled fans, and made wondrous merry over Nature's work; but within
the old house she sat, and sewed upon the baby-clothes, or, wandering
from cupboard to cupboard, found the yellowing garments, laid away more
than a score of years before--the poor little lace-decked trifles that
her first boy had worn; and she thanked heaven, in her humble way, that
twenty-four years had not taken the love and joy of a wife and a mother
out of her heart.

She could not find all her boy's dresses and toys, for she was
open-handed, and had given many of them away to people who needed them.
This brought about an odd encounter. The third person who had a special
interest in the prospect of the birth of a Dolph was young Eustace, and
he found nothing in it wherewith to be pleased. For Eustace Dolph was of
the ultra-fashionables. He cared less for old family than for new ideas,
and he did not let himself fall behind in the march of social progress,
even though he was, as he admitted with humility born of pride, only a
poor devil of a down-town clerk. If his days were occupied, he had his
nights to himself, and he lengthened them to suit himself. At first this
caused his mother to fret a little; but poor Aline had come into her
present world from the conventional seclusion of King's Bridge, and her
only authori