Brady will come for me--there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so
you needn't trouble to sit up."

"But whom are you going with?" he enquired, filled for the first time
with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie
moved.

She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in
her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green. "Oh, you
wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the
room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the
repeated question. What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he
slowly sipped his coffee. Even if she should go with Brady alone, where
was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission.
He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he
had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of
society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought.
Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as
grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a
singularly harmless choice of indiscretions, and had she made a careless
avowal of her intention the matter would probably have dropped at the
moment from his thoughts. But the very secretiveness of her manner--the
suggestion of a hidden motive which dwelt in her nervous movements and
even quivered in the little scintillating aigrette on her blonde
head--aroused in him if not a positive distrust, still a bewildering and
decidedly unpleasant confusion of ideas. He felt, somehow, vaguely
impelled to action, yet for the life of him, he admitted after a moment,
he could see no single direction in which action with regard to his wife
would not savor of the indiscreet, if not of the ridiculous. The
attitude of an aggrieved husband had always showed to him as something
laughable, and an explosion of jealousy had never appeared more vulgar
than it did while he sat patiently conjecturing if such a domestic
cyclone might be counted upon to shake Connie to her senses. In the end
he gave it up as a farce which he felt it would be beyond the power of
his gravity to sustain. "I'll do anything in reason, heaven knows," he
found himself confessing, after the instant's reflection, "but I'll be
hanged before I'll set out in cold blood to play the fool."

The front door, closing with a bang, brought him instantly to his feet
and, glancing through the window, he saw Connie about to st