a month's salary before he gets it."

"Then I will pay the month's bills. You must manage it as I wish or I
return to-day."

Isabel knew that Stone, if not generous in the higher sense, was
delighted to play the extravagant host, and never failed to assume the
role when he had money or credit. And if he was the freest and most
debonair of borrowers at least he repaid when unusually prosperous; and
he prided himself upon never having borrowed from a woman. Once when
Isabel, who could not help liking him, had offered to pay his debts, he
had promptly ascended from the depths of depression in which she had
discovered him before his easel, and replied, gayly:

"Not yet! The sort of man that borrows money from a woman is the sort of
man that has no intention of paying it back. I am not that sort."

With a wife who was or had been an adoring slave, it was little wonder
that Stone's original selfishness had become abnormally enhanced, and
Isabel took into account the feminine silliness of which he had been a
victim since birth. His mother, well-born, southern, indolent, had
indulged him in every whim during his boyhood; then when the familiar
San Francisco crash came, he had turned to actual work with an exceeding
ill grace. The easy ladies of the lower slopes, with whom he had tastes
more than Bohemian in common, had admired him extravagantly, and when he
finally met a girl that suited his tastes as exactly, and was
respectable to boot, he became a devoted if somewhat erratic husband. He
was now thirty-eight and all hope of graduation from perpetual
irresponsible boyhood had been destroyed long since by a woman abjectly
in love with him and too shrewd to antagonize him. With a strong brain
and character a wife might have kept him on the upward artistic path and
converted him to a measure of domesticity. But Paula had neither, was,
moreover, quite satisfied with her mental equipment and blooming little
person; so much so indeed that of late she was beginning to think
herself thrown away, a matrimonial offering; to weary of being the mere
annex of her brilliant husband. She was very clever in her fashion,
however, and Stone still thought her his willing slave, although curtain
lectures were less infrequent than of yore. And she had learned to
manage him in many ways he would have thought it a waste of time to
suspect.

"It will be all right," she said to Isabel. "He always thinks I have
more money than I have, for he never