line Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was to
spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his
engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another
striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May,
and the most mild and florescent of all the blue-and-white Mays the
middle coast had known in years, but added to their sense of wrong.
D'Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple
orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious garden, and report went that
at almost any hour the sound of the tenor's voice and of Caroline's
crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows,
out among the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with
white sails, was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The
garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so
riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to
accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom
the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most of
such a setting for the great tenor.

Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she ought to
be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed,
slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything
else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course, it would
be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she, who would
never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on
superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who
got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she
did get him, and it but nettled them the more.

Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially
exasperated people because they felt that, for the most part, she
had made herself what she was; that she had cold-bloodedly set about
complying with the demands of life and making her position comfortable
and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard
Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could
not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did
not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well,
or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they
did, were fond of stamping C