rail in the present
society game--even by then I was--what did that last newspaper story
say? 'a figure of nation-wide importance.' Then it must be just about
time, I thought, that this figure of nation-wide importance began to
look around a little and married the wife he'd been waiting for and
started to pick up all the things he hadn't had for twelve years.

"Well--Mary. And I was so careful about Mary," his lips twisted, half
whimsically, half painfully. "I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I
knew everything about women.

"She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted--beauty, position,
breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but
there I thought I could help her--the way she ran things for her father
on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in
love with each other--oh dear no--but that I considered on the whole an
advantage--she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most
of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York
and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her
rather. And anyhow I didn't want--passion--exactly. I thought it would
take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting
as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own
dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody
to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be--public--and yet
somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And
I thought I had them all in Mary--I thought I was being about the most
sensible man in the world.

"Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty
hard. I gave her all I could think of--materially at least. And then I
found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman--even
bearably--and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I
never got beyond the social acquaintance stage.

"It wasn't all Mary's fault either--I can see that now. A good deal was
in the way she'd been brought up--they weren't modern about the blisses
of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she
couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to
a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted
something done.

"She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative--that was one thing.
But that wasn't the main trouble--the main trouble was her most curious,
m