o can behave well only so long as they have the
centre of the stage, and are driven by a necessity almost moral to
regain such a place at any cost, so that they may once again begin
the exercise of their virtues.

Anne's performance was too perfect, I thought, for conscious art,
and she was not a genius. She was that most dangerous of all engines,
a good person behaving wickedly. All her past of high-mindedness and
kindness protected her now like an armour from the smallest suspicion.
All the grandeur of her conduct at the time of the divorce was
remembered as a proof that she at least had a noble soul. Who could
doubt that she wished him well?

If so, she soon appeared to be the only person who did. For, as we
all know, pity is one of the most dangerous passions to unloose. It
demands a victim. We rise to pathos, only over the dead bodies of
our nearest and dearest.

Every phrase, every gesture of Anne's stirred one profoundly, and it
was inevitable, I suppose, that Julian should be selected as the
sacrifice. I noticed that people began to speak of him in the past,
though he was still moving among us--"As Julian used to say."

He and Anne fortunately never met, but she and the new Mrs. Julian
had one encounter in public. If even then Anne would have shown the
slightest venom all might still have been well. But, no, the worn,
elderly woman, face to face with the young beauty who had possessed
herself of everything in the world, showed nothing but a tenderness
so perfect that every heart was wrung. I heard Rose criticized for
not receiving her in the same spirit.

The next day Julian was blackballed at a philanthropic club at which
he had allowed himself to be proposed merely from a sense of civic
duty.

Over the incident I know Anne wept. I heard her tears.

"Oh, if I could have spared him that!" she said.

My eyes were cold, but those of Mr. Granger, who came in while her
eyelids were still red, were full of fire.

She spent a week with the Grangers that summer. The whole
family--wife, sons and daughters--had all yielded to the great
illusion.

It must not be supposed that I had failed to warn Julian. The
supineness of his attitude was one of the most irritating features
of the case. He answered me as if I were violating the dead; asked
me if by any chance I didn't see he deserved all he was getting.

No one was surprised when in the autumn he resigned from his firm.
There had been friction between the p