at passionless egotist,
who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all
around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps
have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for
it takes a long apprenticeship to learn to describe analytically what
we know as soon as we see it; but he felt in his inner consciousness
all that we must tell for him. Fascinating, agreeable, artful, knowing,
capable of winning a woman infinitely above himself, incapable of
understanding her,--oh, if he could but touch him with the angel's
spear, and bid him take his true shape before her whom he was gradually
enveloping in the silken meshes of his subtle web! He would make a place
for her in the world,--oh yes, doubtless. He would be proud of her
in company, would dress her handsomely, and show her off in the best
lights. But from the very hour that he felt his power over her firmly
established, he would begin to remodel her after his own worldly
pattern. He would dismantle her of her womanly ideals, and give her in
their place his table of market-values. He would teach her to submit her
sensibilities to her selfish interest, and her tastes to the fashion of
the moment, no matter which world or half-world it came from. "As the
husband is, the wife is,"--he would subdue her to what he worked in.

All this Clement saw, as in apocalyptic vision, stored up for the wife
of Murray Bradshaw, if he read him rightly, as he felt sure he did,
from the few times he had seen him. He would be rich by and by, very
probably. He looked like one of those young men who are sharp, and hard
enough to come to fortune. Then she would have to take her place in the
great social exhibition where the gilded cages are daily opened that the
animals may be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the
sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable
life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an
existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the
piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid!
How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready
to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of
dressing, dawdling, and driving!

This could not go on so forever. Clement had placed a red curtain so
as to throw a rose-bloom on his marble, and give it an aspect which
his fancy turned to the