in a sort of transient, elegiac revery _a
deux_, before the monument. It was no surprise, therefore, when we
heard, two months later, that they had married.

"That stable-boy!" said Raymond. "After--me!"

The expression was strong, and I did not care to assent.

Instead, I began:--

"And now, whatever may or may not have been, everything is--"

"Everything is right, at last!" he concluded for me.

"And if they--those two--are put in the right," he went on, "I suppose I
am put in the wrong--and more in the wrong than ever!"

He stared forward, across his littered table, beyond his bookcases,
through his thick-lensed glasses, as if confronting the stiffening
legend of a husband too old, too dry, too unpliable; the victim,
finally, of a sudden turn that was peculiarly malapropos and
disrelishing, the head of a household tricked rather ridiculously before
the world.

Reserve now began to grow on him. He simplified relationships and saw
fewer people. Before these, and before the many at a greater remove, he
would maintain a cautious dignity as a detached and individual human
creature, as a man,--however much, in the world's eyes, he might have
seemed to fail as a husband.

V

John W. McComas, at forty-five, was in apogee. His bank, as I have said,
was coming to be more than a mere bank; it was now the focus of many
miscellaneous enterprises. Several of these were industrial companies;
prospectuses bearing his name and that of his institution constantly
came my way. Some of these undertakings were novel and daring, but most
of them went through; and he was more likely to use his associates than
they were to use him. As I have said, he possessed but two interests in
the world: his business--now his businesses--and his family; and he
concentrated on both. It might be said that he insisted on the most
which each would yield.

He concentrated on his new domestic life with peculiar intensity. His
boys were away at a preparatory school and were looking forward to
college. He centred on his daughter, a future hope, and on his wife, a
present reality and triumph. Over her, in particular, he bent like a
flame, a bright flame that dazzled and did not yet sear. He was able, by
this time, to coalesce with the general tradition in which she had been
brought up--or at least with the newer tradition to which she had
adjusted herself; and he was able to bring to bear a personal power the
application of which she had never exp