ly, sipping at many pretty
arts. She included among these fine arts, girls. Paul's devotion to golf
and a certain rich young woman gave her fine maternal satisfaction. "He
stays away from that odious Bohemian crowd, and as long as he does that
I am satisfied. Paul is too much of a gentleman to make a good
musician."

During the winter she saw little of her son. His bachelor dinners were
pronounced models, but the musical mob he let alone. "Paul must be going
in for something stunning," they said at his club, and when he took off
his moustache there was a protest.

The young man was not pervious to ridicule. He had found something new
and as he was fond of experimenting and put his soul into all he did,
was generally rewarded for his earnestness. He met Mrs. Arthur Vibert at
the reception of a portrait-painter, and her type being new to him,
resolved to study it.

Presently he went to the art galleries with the lady, and to all the
piano recitals he could bid her. He called several times and admired her
husband greatly; but she snubbed this admiration and he consoled himself
by admiring instead the intellect of the wife.

"I suppose," she confided to him one February afternoon at Sherry's, "I
suppose you think I am not a proper wife because I don't sit home at his
feet and worship my young genius?"

Paul looked at her strong, ugly face and deep iron-colored eyes, and
smiled ironically.

"You don't go in for that sort of thing, I suppose. If you did love him
would you acknowledge it to any one, even to yourself--or to me?"

Ellenora flushed slightly and put down her glass.

"My dear man, when you know me better you won't ask such a question. I
always say what I mean."

"And I don't." They fell to fugitive thinking.

"What poet wrote 'the bright disorder of the stars is solved by music'?"

"I never read modern verse."

"Yes, but this is not as modern as that cornet-virtuoso Kipling, or as
ancient as Tennyson, if you must know."

"What has it to do with you? You are all that I am interested in--at the
present." Paul smiled.

"Don't flatter me, Mr. Goddard. I hate it. It's a cheap trick of the
enemy. Flatter a woman, tell her that she is unlike her sex, repeat to
her your wonderment at her masculine intellect, and see how meekly she
lowers her standard and becomes your bondslave."

"Hello! you have been through the mill," said Paul, brightly. "If I
thought that it would do any good, be of any use, I would