lack parasol, was actually Diane. To his
indignant queries as to why she should be plodding her way on foot, with
this scorching sun overhead, her replies were cheerful and
uncomplaining. A series of small accidents in the stable--such had
constantly happened at her own little chateau in the Oise--having made
it inadvisable to take the horses out, one of the men had conveyed her
luggage to the station, while she herself preferred to walk. She was
used to the exigencies of country life, in both France and Ireland; and
as for the heat, it was a detail to be scorned. Dust, too, was only
matter out of place, and a necessary concomitant of summer. Would he not
drive on, without troubling himself any more about her?

No; decidedly he would not. She must get in and let him take her to the
station. There he could work off his wrath only by buying her ticket and
seeing to her luggage; while his charge to the negro porter to look to
her comfort was of such a nature that during the whole of the journey
she was pelted with magazine literature and tormented with glasses of
ice-water.

That night he found himself impelled by his sense of honor as a
gentleman to write a letter of apology for the indignity she had been
exposed to while in his house. When it had gone he considered it
insufficient, and only the reflection that he ought to have business in
town next day kept him from following it up with a second note.

Arrived in New York, where the city was burning as if under a sun-glass,
he found his chief subject for consideration to be the choice of a club
at which to lunch. There, in the solitude of the deserted smoking-room,
where the heat was tempered, the glare shut out, and the very footfall
subdued, he thought of the little hotel in University Place. Because
human society had mysterious unwritten laws, the woman he loved was
forced to steal away from the freshness and peace of green fields and
sweeping river, to take refuge amid the noisome ugliness from which, in
spite of her courage, her exquisite nature must shrink. He, whose needs
were simple, as his tastes were comparatively coarse, could command the
sybaritic luxury of a Roman patrician, while she, who could not lift her
hand without betraying the habits of inborn refinement, was exposed not
only to vulgar contact, but to a squalor of discomfort as odious as
vice. The thought was a humiliation. Even if he had not loved her, it
would have seemed almost the duty of a man