w, what put that stuff in my head?" he said as he turned impatiently
from the window. "And why does this house, with all its interior luxury,
hypocritically oppose such a forbidding front to its neighbors?" Then
it occurred to him that perhaps the architect instinctively felt that
a more opulent and elaborate exterior would only bring the poverty of
surrounding nature into greater relief. But he was not in the habit of
troubling himself with abstruse problems. A nearer recollection of the
pretty frock he had seen on the staircase--in whose wearer he had
just recognized his vivacious friend--turned his thoughts to her. He
remembered how at their first meeting he had been interested in her
bright audacity, unconventionality, and high spirits, which did not,
however, amuse him as greatly as his later suspicion that she was
playing a self-elected role, often with difficulty, opposition, and
feverishness, rather than spontaneity. He remembered how he had watched
her in the obtrusive assumption of a new fashion, in some reckless
departure from an old one, or in some ostentatious disregard of certain
hard and set rules of St. Kentigern; but that it never seemed to him
that she was the happier for it. He even fancied that her mirth at such
times had an undue nervousness; that her pluck--which was undoubted--had
something of the defiance of despair, and that her persistence often had
the grimness of duty rather than the thoughtlessness of pure amusement.
What was she trying to do?--what was she trying to UNDO or forget? Her
married life was apparently happy and even congenial. Her young husband
was clever, complaisant, yet honestly devoted to her, even to the
extension of a certain camaraderie to her admirers and a chivalrous
protection by half-participation in her maddest freaks. Nor could he
honestly say that her attitude towards his own sex--although marked by a
freedom that often reached the verge of indiscretion--conveyed the least
suggestion of passion or sentiment. The consul, more perceptive than
analytical, found her a puzzle--who was, perhaps, the least mystifying
to others who were content to sum up her eccentricities under the single
vague epithet, "fast." Most women disliked her: she had a few associates
among them, but no confidante, and even these were so unlike her,
again, as to puzzle him still more. And yet he believed himself strictly
impartial.

He walked to the window again, and looked down upon the ravine fr