to hold back the tears.

These weren't frequent occurrences, though. Once settled into what
apparently was going to be their winter's routine, they had so little
time alone together that these moments, when they came, had almost the
tension of those that unmarried lovers enjoy. They were something to
look forward to and make the delicious utmost of.

So, until she got to wondering about Bertie, Rose's instinctive attitude
toward the group of young to middle-aged married people into which her
own marriage had introduced her, was founded on the assumption that,
allowing for occasional exceptions, the husbands and wives felt toward
each other as she and Rodney did--were held together by the same
irresistible, unanalyzable attraction, could remember severally, their
vivid intoxicating hours, just as she remembered the hour when Rodney
had told her the story and the philosophy of his life.

Bertie, or rather the demand for what Bertie supplied, together with
Frederica's explanation of it, brought her the misgiving that marriage
was not, perhaps, even between people who loved each other,--between
husbands who were not "unfaithful" and wives who were not
"mercenary"--quite so simple as it seemed.

The misgiving was not very serious at first--half amused, and wholly
academic, because she hadn't, as yet, the remotest notion that the thing
concerned, or ever could concern, herself; but the point was, it formed
a nucleus, and the property of a nucleus is that it has the power of
attracting to itself particles out of the surrounding nebulous vapor. It
grows as it attracts, and it attracts more strongly as it grows.

An illustration of this principle is in the fact that, but for the
misgiving, she would hardly have asked Simone Greville what she meant by
saying that though she had always supposed the fundamental sex
attraction between men and women to be the same in its essentials, in
all epochs and in all civilizations, her acquaintance with upper-class
American women was leading her to admit a possible exception.

Since that amiable celestial, Wu Ting Fang, made his survey of our
western civilization and left us wondering whether after all we had the
right name for it, no one has studied our leisured and cultivated
classes with more candor and penetration than this great Franco-Austrian
actress. She had ample opportunities for observation, because during the
first week of her tour the precise people who count the most in our