Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1916-11-12
MAGAZINE SECTION for November IL, 1916

but found he could not bear to look at
her. Just as he arose to change his seat
her eyes swept up and passed swiftly over
his face. Her mouth seemed more than
ever on the verge of breaking into smile.
He tried to smile back, but he felt that it
was failure. His lips seemed stretched
into a straight line that would not bend.
He felt his heart pounding.
"She can look at you and smile, he
thought bitterly.
1t was the first bitter thought he had
ever had of his wife. 1t helped him
stiffened his backbone and hardened his
nerves. But the strange feeling of having
suddenly become two persons still chung
to him. He thought to himself in dia-
logue. His old half said to the new, AT
any rate, you know where you stand.
You asked for it, you got it; now take
it and use it, All the rest of the way to
London, his new self answered back with
mumblings and weak interjections: why?
Why? My Cod"
RUT, in spite of the strengthening bit
terness, he felt great gulp of self-pity
as he showed his wife into the charming
fiat he had taken. She flew from room
to room and from low laugh to low laugh,
for Hollender had achieved stroke of
genius. The fiat contained only bare
necessities. In each room was a large
sign, Imagine curtains and portieres,
or, Imagine cretonnes."
The Girl felt lump rise in her throat.
How wonderful that a mere man should
have guarded her against the inevitable
e
serving to her the master solace of beauti-
flying her new home! Wordless, she turned
to him, put her arms around his neck and
kissed him.
He had to make an effort not to answer
that caress with SILVER; for to him the
Girl was not here-the Girl for whom he
had planned and remembered. In her
stead had come strange woman, a Won
derful woman, such as king might covet,
but stranger, a mystery. AT kissing her
he felt a thrill, new and astounding, as
though his lips had tasted of the illicit.
For moment he was Mortified, then
the internal dialogue began again, and he
argued himself back to sanity founded
on reason and facts. He did not know
that reason and facts are but will-o the
wisps in the realm of emotion. In spite
of them the truth remained: his wife was
a strange woman He felt for her fresh
but feverish desire, and gradually sue
cumbed to it. Where all had been purity,
there crept in a faint. He could no longer
think of their love as something sanctified,
hidden and guarded behind some inner,
mutual veil. Day by day the Girl re-
coded, day by day he sank and dragged
her to the level of the flesh.
But it was only to Hollender's distorted
vision that the Girl was withdrawn. She
herself was in the fiat. She had been there
all the time. She had felt great surge
of tenderness as she passed swiftly from
one evidence to another of his thought
fulness and had turned to him with her
heart in her hands and on her lips The
next moment she had come up against
him as barrier. She had found herself
suddenly torn one way by his burning
eyes, and another by his unsmiling face.
Had he been cold, they would soon have
come to open battle and a decision. But
as the slow weeks passed, the new fire in
him, the ungarnished exultaton in mere
material possession, put her off. She sur