to them the fact of Louise's presence for
the first time, and some friends of her own, who had married, and come
to New York to live, and who said they had just got back to town long
enough to learn that she was there. These all reproached her for not
having let them know sooner where she was, and they all more or less
followed up their reproaches with the invitations which she dreaded
because of Maxwell's aversion for them. But she submitted them to him,
and submitted to his refusal to go with her, and declined them. In her
heart she thought he was rather ungracious, but she did not say so,
though in two or three cases of people whom she liked she coaxed him a
little to go with her. Meeting her mother and talking over the life she
used to lead in Boston, and the life so many people were leading there
still, made her a little hungry for society; she would have liked well
enough to find herself at a dinner again, and she would have felt a
little dancing after the dinner no hardship; but she remembered the
promise she had made herself not to tease Maxwell about such things. So
she merely coaxed him, and he so far relented as to ask her why she
could not go without him, and that hurt her, and she said she never
would go without him. All the same, when there came an invitation for
lunch, from a particularly nice friend of her girlhood, she hesitated
and was lost. She had expected, somehow, that it was going to be a very
little lunch, but she found it a very large one, in the number of
people, and after the stress of accounting for her husband's failure to
come with her, she was not sorry to have it so. She inhaled with joy the
atmosphere of the flower-scented rooms; her eye dwelt with delight on
their luxurious and tasteful appointments, the belongings of her former
life, which seemed to emerge in them from the past and claim her again;
the women in their _chic_ New York costumes and their miracles of early
winter hats hailed her a long-lost sister by every graceful movement and
cultivated tone; the correctly tailored and agreeably mannered men had
polite intelligence of a world that Maxwell never would and never could
be part of; the talk of the little amusing, unvital things that began at
once was more precious to her than the problems which the austere
imagination of her husband dealt with; it suddenly fatigued her to think
how hard she had tried to sympathize with his interest in them. Her
heart leaped at sight of the lon