ned slightly, as a child might, in
helpless but non-aggressive dissent. His worn appearance was very
noticeable, in spite of his present happy mood, of which his wife
shrewdly took advantage.

Ida Edgham did not care for books, although she never admitted that
fact, but she could read with her cold feminine astuteness the moods
and souls of men, with unerring quickness. Those last were to her
advantage or disadvantage, and in anything of that nature she was
gifted by nature. Ida Edgham might have been, as her husband might
have been, a poet, an adventuress, who could have made the success of
her age had she not been hindered, as well as aided, by her
self-love. She had the shrewdness which prognosticates as well as
discerns, and saw the inevitableness of the ultimatum of all
irregularities in a world which, however irregular it is in practice,
still holds regularity as its model of conduct and progression. Ida
Edgham would, in the desperate state of the earth before the flood,
have made herself famous. As it was, her irregular talents had a
limited field; however, she did all she could. It always seemed to
her that, as far as the right and wrong of things went, her own
happiness was eminently right, and that it was distinctly wrong for
her, or any one else, to oppose any obstacle to it. She allowed the
pleasant influences of the passing moment to have their full effect
upon her husband, and she continued her leading up to the subject by
those easy and apparently unrelated sequences which none but a
diplomat could have managed.

"Thank you, dear," she said, when Harry resumed his seat. "The air is
cold but very clear and pleasant out to-day," she continued.

"It looks so," said Harry.

"Still, if I were you, I think I would not go out; it might make your
cold worse," said Ida.

"No, I think it would be full as well for me to stay in to-day,"
replied Harry happily. He hemmed a little as he spoke, realizing the
tickle in his throat with rather a pleasant sense of importance than
annoyance. He stretched himself luxuriously in his chair, and gazed
about the warm, perfumed, luxurious apartment.

"You have to go out to-morrow, anyway," said Ida, and she increased
his sense of present comfort by that remark.

"That is so," said Harry, with a slight sigh.

Lately it had seemed harder than ever before for him to start early
in the black winter mornings and hurry for his train. Then, too, he
had what he had never had be