"Yes," he returned; "there was the Frenchman at the fox-hunt: 'No band,
no promenade, no nossing.' Well, we must go on our own tack, as soon as
we discover it."

It need not be imagined that his mother-in-law's look-in of a month made
his wife more contented. She kept on wishing for her new friends in
another quarter, and (more strongly) for the familiar scenes of the
other side. Raymond did not wish the expense involved in either move.
His affairs were now going but tolerably. So far as the bank was
concerned--a bank that had once been almost a "family" institution--his
influence was naught. He was only a stockholder, and a smaller
stockholder than once. His interest, in any sense, was but a brief,
periodical interest in dividends. These were coming with a commendable
regularity still. His rentals came in fairly too; but most of them were
now derived from properties on the edge of the business
district--properties with no special future and likely only to hold
their own however favorable general conditions might continue. Travel?
No. A man travels best in his youth, when he is foot-free, care-free,
fancy-free. Go traveling too late, or once too often, and there is a
difference. The final checking-off of something one has "always meant to
see" may result in the most ashen disappointment of all: even intuition,
without the pains of actual experience, should suffice to warn. Besides,
as Raymond said,--

"We've both had a good deal of it. Let's stay at home."

His wife cast about her. There is a mood in which a deprivation of high
comedy may drive one to low-down farce. To-day people are even going
farther. A worthy stage is dead, they say; and they patronize, somewhat
willfully and contemptuously (or with a loose, slack tolerance that is
worse), the moving pictures. Perhaps it was in some such mood that
Raymond's wife took up with Mrs. Johnny McComas. They were but three
streets apart. Mrs. McComas was lively, energetic, determined to drive
on; and her ability to assimilate rapidly and light-handedly her growing
opulence made it seem by no means a mere vulgar external adornment. She
knew how to move among the remarkable furnishings with which she had
surrounded herself in that old-new house, and how to make the momentum
gained there serve her ends in the world outside.

"It will be a short life here," her husband had told her on their taking
possession; "then, a quick sale--at a good figure--to some manufacturing
con